# Keep Starter Regional Substrate As Real EKS

When importing Starter/Essential v1 into the Premium proof surface, Premium still owns the merged session and proof boundary, but the Starter regional substrate remains real EKS because it is the Starter dataplane and regional control plane. We intentionally do not compress that regional substrate into k3d for the merged proof; baseline `cp9 up` brings up only the k3d-side Starter services, and a separate async activation step brings up the session-scoped real EKS substrate and registers it with the k3d control-plane services before the Starter train runs. That EKS capacity is cleaned up by `cp9 destroy`, rather than being a shared pre-existing CI/CD cluster or a create-TiDB side effect.