Kubernetes on AWS before EKS

• Kubernetes is taking IT by storm, with tremendous adoption.

• IT professionals need to be able to create and operate k8s clusters.

• Traditionally, that meant you had to deploy Kubernetes on yourself:

  • Deploy Master Nodes
  • Deploy Etcd
  • Setup CA for TLS encryption
  • Setup monitoring / auto scaling / self-healing
  • Setup security such as authentication
  • Finally setup the worker nodes

• On top of being hard to deploy, the Kubernetes control plane is hard to manage and operate.

• More and more teams want separate clusters in different environments:

  • Dev
  • Test
  • Pre-Prod
  • Prod

Enter Amazon EKS

• All the hard Kubernetes setup is handled for you:
  • Master nodes in HA (High Availability)
  • Etcd ensemble in HA
  • API server
  • KubeDNS
  • Scheduler
  • Controller manager
  • Cloud controller
• And you just need to deploy the worker node and your application.
• Finally, authentication is handled through IAM.

What is Amazon EKS?

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a managed service that you can use to run Kubernetes on AWS without needing to install, operate, and maintain your own Kubernetes control plane or nodes.

EKS runs Kubernetes control plane instances across multiple AZs to ensure high availability. EKS automatically detects and replaces unhealthy control plane instances, and it provides automated version updates and patching for them.

EKS is integrated with many AWS services to provide scalability and security for your applications, including the following capabilities:

• Amazon ECR for container images
• Elastic Load Balancing for load distribution