Kubernetes on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with Elastic Container with Kubernetes (EKS)

AWS has released native support for Kubernetes, which is available in selected regions.

This guide uses AWS to set up a cluster. This mirrors the steps found at Getting Started with Amazon EKS with some details filled in that are absent

Procedure

1. Create a IAM Role for EKS Service Role. Instructions for creating a role can be found here. It should have the following policies:

   • AmazonEKSClusterPolicy

   • AmazonEKSServicePolicy

   • AmazonEC2ContainerRegistryReadOnly

   (From the user interface, select EKS as the service, then follow the default steps)

2. Create a VPC if you don’t already have one. This step has a lot of variability so it is left to the user. However, one deployment can be found at Getting Started with Amazon EKS, under Create your Amazon EKS Cluster VPC

3. Create a Security Group for the EKS Control Plane to use You do not need to set any permissions on this. The steps below will automatically define access control between the EKS Control Plane and the individual nodes

4. Create your EKS cluster (using the user interface) Use the IAM Role in step 1 and Security Group defined in step 3. The cluster name is going to be used throughout. We’ll use Z2JHKubernetesCluster as an example.

5. Install kubectl and aws-iam-authenticator Refer to Getting Started with Amazon EKS on Configure kubectl for Amazon EKS

6. Configure kubeconfig Also see Getting Started with Amazon EKS Step 2: Configure kubectl for Amazon EKS

   From the user interface on AWS you can retrieve the endpoint-url, base64-encoded-ca-cert. cluster-name is the name given in step 4. If you are using profiles in your AWS configuration, you can uncomment the env block and specify your profile as aws-profile.:

   apiVersion: v1
   clusters:
     - cluster:
       server: <endpoint-url>
       certificate-authority-data: <base64-encoded-ca-cert>
       name: kubernetes
       contexts:
         - context:
           cluster: kubernetes
           user: aws
           name: aws
           current-context: aws
           kind: Config
           preferences: {}
           users:
             - name: aws
               user:
                 exec:
                   apiVersion: client.authentication.k8s.io/v1alpha1
                   command: aws-iam-authenticator
                   args:
                     - "token"
                     - "-i"
                     - "<cluster-name>"
                   # env:
                   # - name: AWS_PROFILE
                   #   value: "<aws-profile>"
   

7. Verify kubectl works

   kubectl get svc
   

   should return kubernetes and ClusterIP

8. Create the nodes using CloudFormation

   See Getting Started with Amazon EKS Step 3: Launch and Configure Amazon EKS Worker Nodes

   Warning if you are endeavoring to deploy on a private network, the cloudformation template creates a public IP for each worker node though there is no route to get there if you specified only private subnets. Regardless, if you wish to correct this, you can edit the cloudformation template by changing Resources.NodeLaunchConfig.Properties.AssociatePublicIpAddress from 'true' to 'false'

9. Create a AWS authentication ConfigMap

   This is necessary for the workers to find the master plane.

   See Getting Started with Amazon EKS Step 3: Launch and Configure Amazon EKS Worker Nodes

Cluster Autoscaler

If you’d like to do some optimizations, you need to deploy Cluster Autoscaler (CA) first.