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Guidance for Automated Provisioning of Application-Ready Amazon EKS Clusters

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Overview

This Guidance demonstrates how to set up a workload accelerator for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) using Terraform blueprints. This collection of sample deployments and configurations addresses the challenges often associated with building your first application-ready Amazon EKS cluster. It incorporates a set of pre-configured and integrated tools, add-ons, and best practices to support core capabilities, including automatic scalability, observability, networking, and security. By using this Guidance and the Terraform blueprints, you can accelerate the process of establishing a fully configured, production-ready Amazon EKS cluster to support your workloads, without having to build and maintain the underlying infrastructure.

How it works

These technical details feature an architecture diagram to illustrate how to effectively use this solution. The architecture diagram shows the key components and their interactions, providing an overview of the architecture's structure and functionality step-by-step.

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Ready to deploy? Review the sample code on GitHub for detailed deployment instructions to deploy as-is or customize to fit your needs. 

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Well-Architected Pillars

The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.

This Guidance provisions observability tooling either through an open source software (OSS) or AWS, helping you follow best practices for cross-service configuration. For AWS observability tooling (using Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus and Amazon Managed Grafana), this Guidance creates Grafana dashboards based on the AWS Observability Accelerator project. Additionally, Amazon CloudWatch provides focused log event management. You can use these dashboards and logs to easily monitor utilization trends, quickly identify issues and their root causes, and make data-driven decisions for optimizing operations.

Read the Operational Excellence whitepaper 

This Guidance configures a secured VPC with public, private, and isolated subnets, so when applications are being deployed to Amazon EKS, they cannot be directly accessed externally. You can also request a completely isolated VPC (no internet access). For that use, this Guidance provisions VPC endpoints for the relevant services that are needed for the cluster operations, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon ECR, Amazon EKS, or Amazon EBS. Additionally, you can use IAM to create fine-grained user-facing roles to control access to Amazon EKS clusters.

Read the Security whitepaper 

Amazon EKS scales automatically, and the Kubernetes control plane deploys across multiple AZs to maintain consistent infrastructure health and availability. Additionally, by deploying Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus and Amazon Managed Grafana according to best practices, you can make sure they support high availability and fault tolerance. Finally, the Karpenter automatic scaler for Amazon EKS compute nodes manages the application infrastructure and helps make sure compute node instances are running on the latest Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for the cluster version.

Read the Reliability whitepaper 

Karpenter helps right-size instances and automatically scales Amazon EKS cluster compute nodes up and down as needed to match the total resources requested by applications running in the cluster. Additionally, it provisions instances powered by AWS Graviton processors to enhance price performance.

Read the Performance Efficiency whitepaper 

The cost for the Amazon EKS cluster is fixed, regardless of size, and is significantly lower than the cost of self-maintaining a secured, highly available, and scalable infrastructure. For compute, Karpenter provisions and allocates resources strictly according to the needs of the application workload so that you don’t have to pay for overprovisioned resources. Additionally, AWS Graviton processors deliver enhanced price performance for the compute nodes.

Read the Cost Optimization whitepaper 

Amazon EKS (with Amazon EC2 compute node instances) and Amazon ECR run on AWS, so you do not need to provision your own physical infrastructure. Karpenter automatically scales the cluster’s compute nodes based on demand, and AWS Graviton processors provide up to 40 percent energy efficiency compared to other processors for Amazon EC2 instances, helping you minimize your compute resource footprint and its environmental impact.

Read the Sustainability whitepaper 

Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.