Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes Gateway Deep Dive — VXLAN, Cilium VTEP, and Lease-Based Leader Election Redefining Hybrid Kubernetes Networking in 2026 On April 28, 2026, alongside the OpenAI–Bedrock partnership announcement at the What's Next with AWS 2026 keynote, AWS quietly delivered one of the most operationally meaningful container updates of the year: the general availability of Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes gateway . Since EKS Hybrid Nodes first shipped at re:Invent 2024, the single biggest operational tax on adopters has been a deceptively simple question: "How do we make on-premises pod CIDRs routable from the VPC?" That tax disappears with one Helm install.…