Verify the ACK capability

The prepare-environment step has already enabled the ACK capability on the cluster. Before doing anything else, let's confirm it's ACTIVE and the DynamoDB CRDs are available.

Inspect the capability resource directly:

~$aws eks describe-capability \

--cluster-name $EKS_CLUSTER_AUTO_NAME \

--capability-name $EKS_CAP_ACK_CAPABILITY \

--query 'capability.status' --output text

ACTIVE

A capability transitions through CREATING → ACTIVE. If the status here is anything other than ACTIVE, wait a moment and re-run the command — the capability may still be initializing.

Now check that the DynamoDB controller's custom resources are registered in the cluster:

~$kubectl get crd tables.dynamodb.services.k8s.aws \

-o jsonpath='{.spec.names.kind}{"\n"}'

Table

~$kubectl api-resources --api-group=dynamodb.services.k8s.aws

NAME             SHORTNAMES   APIVERSION                              NAMESPACED   KIND

backups                       dynamodb.services.k8s.aws/v1alpha1      true         Backup

globaltables                  dynamodb.services.k8s.aws/v1alpha1      true         GlobalTable

tables                        dynamodb.services.k8s.aws/v1alpha1      true         Table

info

Notice we never installed a Helm chart, never created an ack-system namespace, and there's no DynamoDB controller Pod running on your worker nodes. The capability runs in AWS-managed infrastructure outside the cluster — what you see inside the cluster are only the CRDs the capability registered for you to apply.

With the capability ACTIVE and the CRDs in place, we're ready to provision a DynamoDB table from Kubernetes.