EKS Blueprints - easier and faster way to adopt Kubernetes

Ravi Yasakeerthi — Sun, 13 Nov 2022 15:59:48 +0000

In the microservices world, a considerable amount of containerized applications are run on Kubernetes. It's one of the best open-source projects of all time. However, adopting it is a different story. Due to the complexity and lack of inadequate IT resources, many organizations find it challenging.

In this journey, if we think about the pain points which are holding the development teams back.

Developer wait time. It takes weeks to provision the infrastructure and then configure it with the required add-ons.
Difficulty in tracking infrastructure changes over time.
Lack of Automation. Software is manually deployed on an ad-hoc basis.
Tooling and configuration inconsistencies across teams and environments.
Ensure the security best practices on cluster and application levels.

Imagine if we could have a template that helps us to address all these pain points and accelerate time to market. EKS Blueprints offers all of it.

What is EKS Blueprints

It's a set of Infrastructures as Code scripts organized as a template that helps you provision EKS clusters, bootstrapped with all required add-ons to deploy and operate workloads in the cluster. Once a template is configured, you can use it as a blueprint to spawn consistent environments across multiple AWS accounts and regions.

Benefits

Once we adopt EKS Blueprints with GitOps to manage the application delivery, we can eliminate the end-to-end manual processes. Create any number of Well-Architected environments, and destroy them at will. Then, recreate them quickly or revert them to any point in time. Also can manage teams, namespaces, and access control from the same git repo where you define the infrastructure. This means you can iterate rapidly. Consistency is another significant benefit we can achieve with IaC. It also allows the entire infra to be version controlled and updated using proper review and approval processes.

Live Demo

Repos

Repos used for the live demo.

https://github.com/lkravi/eks_blueprints
https://github.com/lkravi/eks_blueprints_workloads
https://github.com/lkravi/eks_blueprints_demo_app

AWS EKS BluePrint for Terraform Repo

https://github.com/aws-ia/terraform-aws-eks-blueprints

Finally I would like to thank awesome AWS containers team for initiating this Open source repo and making our life easier. Apoorva_Kulkarni, Kevin_Coleman, Mikhail_Shapirov, Vara_Bonthu, Zvika Nadav

Create your own Kubernetes Cluster in 15 Minutes on AWS EC2

Ravi Yasakeerthi — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 12:39:50 +0000

I was thinking about this project for a long time and finally, I was able to find some time to put things together. I know, these days it’s not a big deal to quickly spin up a Kubernetes cluster with most of the cloud service providers. But we don’t have full control over them as they are managed by cloud providers. Sometimes we all got requirements to change bits and pieces here and there to try new things in Kubernetes clusters. It’s always nice if we can quickly spin up a k8 cluster where we can manage all the pieces as we need.

At the time of this article, I managed to complete the Highly Available multi-master Kubernetes cluster as per the above architecture diagram. Once you apply the Terraform code, it will do the infrastructure provisioning and then the cluster configurations with Ansible. Although, I didn’t include the Ingress traffic management part and the post cluster configuration in this repo as I have already discussed them in the article linked here.

Let me walk you through the code and quick demo.

As you can see in the demo, We have full control over all the layers. for example, if we need to try out different container runtime, we can change the ansible-playbook and quickly spin up a new cluster with the required new configuration. One thing to note, I didn’t pay much attention to security hardening at the moment as this is just an experimental cluster. So this is not good for production workloads. But I’m planning to improve the code 😊 as soon as I found more time.

GitHub Repo : https://github.com/lkravi/kube8aws

I know that there are many areas in which we can improve on this repo. If you find anything interesting in this repo. feel free to contribute.

Forem: Ravi Yasakeerthi