Hello and welcome to this edition of Ctrl+Alt+Deploy! I’m Lauro Müller, and I’m super happy to have you here with me 😄 Let’s spend the next few minutes sharpening our skills and learning something new and relevant for running production systems 💪 Today we’re going to spend some time to understand all the different AWS resources that need to be in place before we can successfully schedule a pod in EKS.
A Kubernetes cluster on AWS is usually described as though it were a single thing you provision. You create a cluster, and then you have a cluster. In practice the cluster is one API call among many, and on its own it cannot run a single pod. What makes it work is a set of AWS services underneath it, each solving a different problem, connected to each other in a specific order.
In this edition, we’ll take a high-level view of the many different components that are required for the cluster to have minimal functionality. For each layer, the question is what has to exist and why it is there, not necessarily an extensive account of all configuration options. If you have used EKS through a module or a console wizard and never had a clear picture of what those produced, this will fill in the missing pieces.
EKS offers many more features than what is described here. Our goal is to get a working mental model of how different AWS services relate to EKS and to Kubernetes, not to give a comprehensive list of EKS features.
This edition grew out of a course I'm currently building on running Kubernetes on AWS with EKS and Terraform. Writing each of these resources by hand, rather than reaching for a module, made the size of the supporting infrastructure difficult to ignore. Most of the work in getting a cluster to the point where it can schedule a pod turns out to have very little to do with Kubernetes itself.
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