Amazon EKS Cluster & Managed Node Group Provisioning
31 minIntermediate
This creates billable resources. Run it in a dev environment and destroy it when you finish. Set a budget alarm first.
Success criteria
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What you are building#
What is Amazon EKS?#
Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) is a managed Kubernetes service that eliminates the operational burden of deploying and maintaining the Kubernetes Control Plane (API Server, etcd, Controller Manager, Scheduler) across multi-AZ availability zones.
- Managed Node Groups: AWS handles provisioning, updating, and auto-repairing EC2 instances acting as Kubernetes worker nodes.
- OIDC Provider: Enables IRSA (IAM Roles for Service Accounts) so Kubernetes pods can assume IAM roles natively.
text
AMAZON EKS CLUSTER ARCHITECTURE
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| AWS MANAGED KUBERNETES CONTROL PLANE (Managed by AWS) |
| - API Server (kube-apiserver) |
| - High-Availability etcd Key-Value Store |
| - Controller Manager & Scheduler |
+----------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+
|
| Secure Control Plane Communication
v
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| PRIVATE SUBNETS (VPC) — EKS MANAGED NODE GROUP |
| |
| +-------------------------------+ +---------------------------------+ |
| | Worker Node 1 (us-east-1a) | | Worker Node 2 (us-east-1b) | |
| | Type: t3.medium | | Type: t3.medium | |
| | - Kubelet & Containerd | | - Kubelet & Containerd | |
| | - AWS VPC CNI Plugin | | - AWS VPC CNI Plugin | |
| +-------------------------------+ +---------------------------------+ |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+Steps#
Step 1: Deploy EKS Cluster (~15-20 Minutes Creation Time)#
Terminal
cd 01-Infrastructure-Terraform/Lab05-EKS-Cluster-Provisioning
terraform init
terraform apply -auto-approveStep 2: Configure Local kubectl Context#
Terminal
aws eks update-kubeconfig --name nti-devops-eks --region us-east-1Verify it worked#
Terminal
kubectl get nodesExpected Output:
text
NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION
ip-10-0-10-42.ec2.internal Ready <none> 3m20s v1.34.0
ip-10-0-11-89.ec2.internal Ready <none> 3m18s v1.34.0Clean up#
Run this even if you did not finish. Everything above is destroyable, and an account full of half-built experiments is how a surprise bill starts.
Destructive — This removes real resources. Check which environment you are in first.
Terminal
terraform destroy -auto-approve
# The control plane is the expensive part. Confirm no cluster survives:
aws eks list-clusters --query 'clusters'
# Node groups can outlive a failed destroy:
aws ec2 describe-instances --filters Name=instance-state-name,Values=running --query 'Reservations[].Instances[].[InstanceId,InstanceType]' --output table
# And load balancers created by Kubernetes Services are not in Terraform state:
aws elbv2 describe-load-balancers --query 'LoadBalancers[].LoadBalancerArn'Cost of this lab: Billable, and never free. An EKS control plane is $0.10/hour (~$73/month) from the moment it exists, with no free tier — plus the node group's EC2 instances and any NAT Gateway. Budget a few dollars for an afternoon, and destroy the cluster the same day.