There are many occasions where you would want to extend the capabilities of your EKS cluster to make the cluster more efficient as we saw in Chapter 7 . In Chapter 7 , we were able to extend the pod density of a t3.small instance from 12 IP addresses to 120 addresses with the help of the VPC CNI plugin. Plugins, also known as addons, are software designed to support or extend the operational capabilities of EKS clusters. These include observability, efficient networking, autoscaling, and service integration. The type of addons and how they operate will be an important learning and a foundation for more advanced topics such as service mesh, service integration, persistent storage, and more. This chapter begins an extensive discussion about addons and ends with addon deployment and upgrades. The goal here is to offer a high-level introduction to the topic to complete the discussion on the EKS cluster components. Further application of addons will follow later in the book. You should learn about diverse kinds of addons and when to use them after going through the chapter.