Get started with Amazon EKS – eksctl (original) (raw)

This guide helps you to create all of the required resources to get started with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) using eksctl, a simple command line utility for creating and managing Kubernetes clusters on Amazon EKS. At the end of this tutorial, you will have a running Amazon EKS cluster that you can deploy applications to.

The procedures in this guide create several resources for you automatically that you have to create manually when you create your cluster using the AWS Management Console. If you’d rather manually create most of the resources to better understand how they interact with each other, then use the AWS Management Console to create your cluster and compute. For more information, see Get started with Amazon EKS – AWS Management Console and AWS CLI.

Prerequisites

Before starting this tutorial, you must install and configure the AWS CLI, kubectl, and eksctl tools as described in Set up to use Amazon EKS.

Step 1: Create your Amazon EKS cluster and nodes

Important

To get started as simply and quickly as possible, this topic includes steps to create a cluster and nodes with default settings. Before creating a cluster and nodes for production use, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with all settings and deploy a cluster and nodes with the settings that meet your requirements. For more information, see Create an Amazon EKS cluster and Manage compute resources by using nodes. Some settings can only be enabled when creating your cluster and nodes.

You can create a cluster with one of the following node types. To learn more about each type, see Manage compute resources by using nodes. After your cluster is deployed, you can add other node types.

Fargate – Linux – Select this type of node if you want to run Linux applications on Simplify compute management with AWS Fargate. Fargate is a serverless compute engine that lets you deploy Kubernetes Pods without managing Amazon EC2 instances.
Managed nodes – Linux – Select this type of node if you want to run Amazon Linux applications on Amazon EC2 instances. Though not covered in this guide, you can also add Windows self-managed and Bottlerocket nodes to your cluster.

Create your Amazon EKS cluster with the following command. You can replace my-cluster with your own value. The name can contain only alphanumeric characters (case-sensitive) and hyphens. It must start with an alphanumeric character and can’t be longer than 100 characters. The name must be unique within the AWS Region and AWS account that you’re creating the cluster in. Replace region-code with any AWS Region that is supported by Amazon EKS. For a list of AWS Regions, see Amazon EKS endpoints and quotas in the AWS General Reference guide.

Fargate - Linux

eksctl create cluster --name my-cluster --region region-code --fargate

Managed nodes - Linux

eksctl create cluster --name my-cluster --region region-code

Cluster creation takes several minutes. During creation you’ll see several lines of output. The last line of output is similar to the following example line.

[...] [✓] EKS cluster "my-cluster" in "region-code" region is ready

eksctl created a kubectl config file in ~/.kube/config or added the new cluster’s configuration within an existing config file in ~/.kube/config on your computer.

After cluster creation is complete, view the AWS CloudFormation stack named eksctl-`my-cluster`-cluster in the AWS CloudFormation console to see all of the resources that were created.

Step 2: View Kubernetes resources

View your cluster nodes.

kubectl get nodes -o wide

An example output is as follows.
Fargate - Linux

NAME                                                STATUS   ROLES    AGE     VERSION              INTERNAL-IP   EXTERNAL-IP   OS-IMAGE         KERNEL-VERSION                  CONTAINER-RUNTIME  
fargate-ip-192-0-2-0.region-code.compute.internal   Ready    <none>   8m3s    v1.2.3-eks-1234567   192.0.2.0     <none>        Amazon Linux 2   1.23.456-789.012.amzn2.x86_64   containerd://1.2.3  
fargate-ip-192-0-2-1.region-code.compute.internal   Ready    <none>   7m30s   v1.2.3-eks-1234567   192-0-2-1     <none>        Amazon Linux 2   1.23.456-789.012.amzn2.x86_64   containerd://1.2.3

Managed nodes - Linux

NAME                                        STATUS   ROLES    AGE    VERSION              INTERNAL-IP   EXTERNAL-IP   OS-IMAGE         KERNEL-VERSION                  CONTAINER-RUNTIME  
ip-192-0-2-0.region-code.compute.internal   Ready    <none>   6m7s   v1.2.3-eks-1234567   192.0.2.0     192.0.2.2     Amazon Linux 2   1.23.456-789.012.amzn2.x86_64   containerd://1.2.3  
ip-192-0-2-1.region-code.compute.internal   Ready    <none>   6m4s   v1.2.3-eks-1234567   192.0.2.1     192.0.2.3     Amazon Linux 2   1.23.456-789.012.amzn2.x86_64   containerd://1.2.3

For more information about what you see in the output, see View Kubernetes resources in the AWS Management Console. 2. View the workloads running on your cluster.

kubectl get pods -A -o wide

An example output is as follows.
Fargate - Linux

NAMESPACE     NAME                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE   IP          NODE                                                NOMINATED NODE   READINESS GATES  
kube-system   coredns-1234567890-abcde   1/1     Running   0          18m   192.0.2.0   fargate-ip-192-0-2-0.region-code.compute.internal   <none>           <none>  
kube-system   coredns-1234567890-12345   1/1     Running   0          18m   192.0.2.1   fargate-ip-192-0-2-1.region-code.compute.internal   <none>           <none>

Managed nodes - Linux

NAMESPACE     NAME                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE     IP          NODE                                        NOMINATED NODE   READINESS GATES  
kube-system   aws-node-12345             1/1     Running   0          7m43s   192.0.2.1   ip-192-0-2-1.region-code.compute.internal   <none>           <none>  
kube-system   aws-node-67890             1/1     Running   0          7m46s   192.0.2.0   ip-192-0-2-0.region-code.compute.internal   <none>           <none>  
kube-system   coredns-1234567890-abcde   1/1     Running   0          14m     192.0.2.3   ip-192-0-2-3.region-code.compute.internal   <none>           <none>  
kube-system   coredns-1234567890-12345   1/1     Running   0          14m     192.0.2.4   ip-192-0-2-4.region-code.compute.internal   <none>           <none>  
kube-system   kube-proxy-12345           1/1     Running   0          7m46s   192.0.2.0   ip-192-0-2-0.region-code.compute.internal   <none>           <none>  
kube-system   kube-proxy-67890           1/1     Running   0          7m43s   192.0.2.1   ip-192-0-2-1.region-code.compute.internal   <none>           <none>

For more information about what you see in the output, see View Kubernetes resources in the AWS Management Console.

Step 3: Delete your cluster and nodes

After you’ve finished with the cluster and nodes that you created for this tutorial, you should clean up by deleting the cluster and nodes with the following command. If you want to do more with this cluster before you clean up, see Next steps.

eksctl delete cluster --name my-cluster --region region-code

Next steps

The following documentation topics help you to extend the functionality of your cluster.

Deploy a sample application to your cluster.
The IAM principal that created the cluster is the only principal that can make calls to the Kubernetes API server with kubectl or the AWS Management Console. If you want other IAM principals to have access to your cluster, then you need to add them. For more information, see Grant IAM users and roles access to Kubernetes APIs and Required permissions.
Before deploying a cluster for production use, we recommend familiarizing yourself with all of the settings for clusters and nodes. Some settings (such as enabling SSH access to Amazon EC2 nodes) must be made when the cluster is created.
To increase security for your cluster, configure the Amazon VPC Container Networking Interface plugin to use IAM roles for service accounts.