Building & maintaining Production scale EKS cluster doesn't have to be a huge operational overhead with EKS Blueprints

1. Bootstrapping Clusters with
EKS Blueprints
Geethika Guruge
Lead Consultant@CMD
https://www.linkedin.com/in/geethika-guruge/

2. Agenda
● Why Kubernetes
● Challenges
● Blueprints to the rescue
● Demo time

3. Why do we need k8s

4. Why Do we need
K8s
Do we really need Kubernetes?
● Containers are here to stay as a form of packaging and delivering the software.
● Kubernetes is an orchestration platform
● You need it if you want to run containers at scale.

5. Why Do we need
K8s
What does Kubernetes give you?
● Service discovery and load balancing
● Storage orchestration
● Automated rollouts and rollbacks
● Automatic bin packing
● Self-healing
● Secret and configuration management
● etc

6. Challenges

7. Challenges
Building the cluster - The need of the “add-ons”
● Calico
● Core-DNS
● Ingress Controllers
● CNI plugins
● Cert-Manager
● Cluster Autoscaler
● etc

8. Challenges
Production Ready EKS cluster

9. Challenges
Day 2 Operations
● Keeping the cluster Secure and Uptodate
● Keeping the add-ons uptodate
● Operations/Platforms team’s workload
● Management of the cluster becomes painful

10. EKS Blueprints

11. EKS Blueprints
What does it give you?
● Helps you configure complete EKS clusters
● Fully bootstrapped with the operational software
● The desired state can be configured as an IaC blueprint.
● Can deploy consistent environments across multiple AWS accounts and regions
● EKS Blueprints builds on existing work from the EKS open source community
● Both Terraform and CDK Blueprints are available

12. EKS Blueprints
Example Blueprints - How to use EKS Blueprints to solve specific technical challenges
● EMR on EKS
● EKS Cluster with Karpenter
● IPv6 EKS Cluster
● EKS Cluster with External DNS
● Managed Workflow with Apache Airflow
● etc, etc
https://github.com/aws-ia/terraform-aws-eks-blueprints
https://github.com/aws-quickstart/cdk-eks-blueprints

13. EKS Blueprints
Okay….How much code I have to write?
const app = new cdk.App();
const stackId = "<stack_id>";
// By default will provision in a new VPC
blueprints.EksBlueprint.builder()
.region('us-west-2')
.version(eks.KubernetesVersion.V1_21)
.addOns(
new blueprints.addons.VpcCniAddOn(),
new blueprints.addons.CoreDnsAddOn(),
new blueprints.addons.KubeProxyAddOn(),
// Self-managed Add-ons
new blueprints.addons.AwsForFluentBitAddOn(),
new blueprints.addons.AwsLoadBalancerControllerAddOn(),
new blueprints.addons.ClusterAutoScalerAddOn(),
new blueprints.addons.EfsCsiDriverAddOn(),
new blueprints.addons.MetricsServerAddOn()
)
.build(app, stackId);

14. EKS Blueprints
What if I want to customize an add-on?
const loadBalancerAddOn = new blueprints.AwsLoadBalancerControllerAddOn({
name: "aws-load-balancer-controller",
chart: "aws-load-balancer-controller",
repository: "https://aws.github.io/eks-charts",
version: "1.3.1",
namespace: "kube-system",
enableWaf: true,
values: {
operating_system: "linux"
}
});
blueprints.EksBlueprint.builder()
.addOns(loadBalancerAddOn)
.build(app, stackId);

15. EKS Blueprints
Okay that's the add-ons….how about my EKS Cluster?
// Managed Node Group
const props: blueprints.MngClusterProviderProps = {
version: eks.KubernetesVersion.V1_21,
minSize: 2,
maxSize: 5,
instanceTypes: [new ec2.InstanceType('m5.large')],
}
const mngClusterProvider = new blueprints.MngClusterProvider(props);
// Fargate Profile
const fargateProfiles: Map<string, eks.FargateProfileOptions> = new Map([
["default", { selectors: [{ namespace: "default" }] }]
]);
const fargateClusterProvider = new blueprints.FargateClusterProvider({
fargateProfiles,
version: eks.KubernetesVersion.V1_21
});

16. Demo
Let's build a Production ready EKS Cluster in 30 mins