I have this mixed cluster which shows all the nodes as Ready (both Windows & Linux ones). However, only the Linux nodes have aws-node & kube-proxy pods. I RDPed into a Windows node and can see a kube-proxy service.
My question remains: do the Windows nodes need aws-node & kube-proxy pods in the kube-system namespace or do they work differently than Linux ones?
kube-proxy pods are part of default installation of Kubernetes. They are automaticaly created, and are needed on both Linux and Windows.
kube-proxy is a network proxy that runs on each node in your cluster, implementing part of the Kubernetes Service concept.
kube-proxy maintains network rules on nodes. These network rules allow network communication to your Pods from network sessions inside or outside of your cluster. [source]
aws-node pod is a part of AWS CNI plugin for Kubernetes
The Amazon VPC Container Network Interface (CNI) plugin for Kubernetes is deployed with each of your Amazon EC2 nodes in a Daemonset with the name
aws-node. The plugin consists of two primary components:
[...] [source]
It is currently only supported on Linux. Windows nodes are using a different CNI plugin - vpc-shared-eni
