Create Amazon EKS cluster using Terraform

I have found AWS EKS introduction on the HashiCorp learning portal and thought I’d give it a try and test the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services. Using cloud native container services like EKS is getting more popular and makes it easier for everyone running a Kubernetes cluster and start deploying container straight away without the overhead of maintaining and patching the control-plane and leave this to AWS.

Creating the EKS cluster is pretty easy by just running terraform apply. The only prerequisite is to have kubectl and AWS IAM authenticator installed. You find the terraform files on my repository https://github.com/berndonline/aws-eks-terraform

# Initializing and create EKS cluster
terraform init
terraform apply  

# Generate kubeconfig and configmap for adding worker nodes
terraform output kubeconfig > ./kubeconfig
terraform output config_map_aws_auth > ./config_map_aws_auth.yaml

# Apply configmap for worker nodes to join the cluster
export KUBECONFIG=./kubeconfig
kubectl apply -f ./config_map_aws_auth.yaml
kubectl get nodes --watch

Let’s have a look at the AWS EKS console:

In the cluster details you see general information:

On the EC2 side you see two worker nodes as defined:

Now we can deploy an example application:

$ kubectl create -f example/hello-kubernetes.yml
service/hello-kubernetes created
deployment.apps/hello-kubernetes created
ingress.extensions/hello-ingress created

Checking that the pods are running and the correct resources are created:

$ kubectl get all
NAME                                   READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
pod/hello-kubernetes-b75555c67-4fhfn   1/1     Running   0          1m
pod/hello-kubernetes-b75555c67-pzmlw   1/1     Running   0          1m

NAME                       TYPE           CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP                                                              PORT(S)        AGE
service/hello-kubernetes   LoadBalancer   172.20.108.223   ac1dc1ab84e5c11e9ab7e0211179d9b9-394134490.eu-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com   80:32043/TCP   1m
service/kubernetes         ClusterIP      172.20.0.1                                                                                443/TCP        26m

NAME                               DESIRED   CURRENT   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
deployment.apps/hello-kubernetes   2         2         2            2           1m

NAME                                         DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
replicaset.apps/hello-kubernetes-b75555c67   2         2         2       1m

With the ingress service the EKS cluster is automatically creating an ELB load balancer and forward traffic to the two worker nodes:

Example application:

I have used a very simple Jenkins pipeline to create the AWS EKS cluster:

pipeline {
    agent any
    environment {
        AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID = credentials('AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID')
        AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = credentials('AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY')
    }
    stages {
        stage('prepare workspace') {
            steps {
                sh 'rm -rf *'
                git branch: 'master', url: 'https://github.com/berndonline/aws-eks-terraform.git'
                sh 'terraform init'
            }
        }
        stage('terraform apply') {
            steps {
                sh 'terraform apply -auto-approve'
                sh 'terraform output kubeconfig > ./kubeconfig'
                sh 'terraform output config_map_aws_auth > ./config_map_aws_auth.yaml'
                sh 'export KUBECONFIG=./kubeconfig'
            }
        }
        stage('add worker nodes') {
            steps {
                sh 'kubectl apply -f ./config_map_aws_auth.yaml --kubeconfig=./kubeconfig'
                sh 'sleep 60'
            }
        }
        stage('deploy example application') {
            steps {    
                sh 'kubectl apply -f ./example/hello-kubernetes.yml --kubeconfig=./kubeconfig'
                sh 'kubectl get all --kubeconfig=./kubeconfig'
            }
        }
        stage('Run terraform destroy') {
            steps {
                input 'Run terraform destroy?'
            }
        }
        stage('terraform destroy') {
            steps {
                sh 'kubectl delete -f ./example/hello-kubernetes.yml --kubeconfig=./kubeconfig'
                sh 'sleep 60'
                sh 'terraform destroy -force'
            }
        }
    }
}

I really like how easy and quick it is to create an AWS EKS cluster in less than 15 mins.