How to get an EKS Cluster name from an AWS Region

You can use the aws cli to get the EKS cluster name, parse the first result and return it into a variable.

This is handy in automation scripts where you need to target the cluster without hardcoding its name. I use this in CI/CD pipelines that deploy to whatever EKS cluster exists in a given region.

EKS_CLUSTER_NAME=$(aws eks list-clusters --region us-west-2 --query clusters[0] --output text)
echo $EKS_CLUSTER_NAME

More on AWS if that’s useful.

The --query clusters[0] grabs the first cluster in the list, so this only works well when you have a single cluster per region. If you have multiple clusters, you’ll want to filter by name pattern or use tags to identify the right one. You can also drop the [0] to get all cluster names and iterate over them.