Amazon EKS

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) provides an optimized Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and AWS CloudFormation template that make it easy to provision worker nodes for your Amazon EKS cluster on AWS. These assets are both open source and available now on Github. In addition to the EKS Optimized AMI, the Packer by Hashicorp scripts used to build the EKS Optimized AMI are available on GitHub so you can build your own worker node AMI. These are useful if you want to modify the EKS Optimized AMI for your own purposes, or perhaps you want to bring your own OS entirely and mirror the configuration we use for the EKS Optimized AMI.

Previously, the CloudFormation template and the EKS Optimized AMI were tightly coupled, meaning the AMI required UserData from the CloudFormation template in order to properly boot and check in to an EKS Cluster.

The new EKS-optimized AMI and Cloudformation template refactors and breaks out the EKS Optimized AMI UserData into a separate resource: EKS Bootstrap.sh. This script simplifies the bootstrapping process for EKS worker nodes and removes the dependency on the amazon-eks-nodegroup.yaml Cloudformation template. This makes it significantly easier to provision nodes for an EKS cluster using the AWS CLI or another provisioning tool, such as Terraform.

Kubernetes with EKS

Amazon EKS (Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes) is a managed Kubernetes service that allows you to run Kubernetes on AWS without the hassle of managing the Kubernetes control plane.

The Kubernetes control plane plays a crucial role in a Kubernetes deployment as it is responsible for how Kubernetes communicates with your cluster — starting and stopping new containers, scheduling containers, performing health checks, and many more management tasks.

The big benefit of EKS, and other similar hosted Kubernetes services, is taking away the operational burden involved in running this control plane. You deploy cluster worker nodes using defined AMIs and with the help of CloudFormation, and EKS will provision, scale and manage the Kubernetes control plane for you to ensure high availability, security and scalability.