unfortunately 1 year seems to be a long time in the k8s community. Regarding your original question, EBS works without a driver because it's (currently) in tree: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/tree/323f34858de18b862d43c40b2cced65ad8e24052/pkg/volume/awsebs although there are tentative plans to remove it at some point in the future. So yes, you will have to install the EFS CSI driver