Create an EKS Cluster with Nginx Application on AWS

Introduction

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed Kubernetes service that makes it easy for you to run Kubernetes on AWS and on-premises. Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Amazon EKS is certified Kubernetes-conformant, so existing applications that run on upstream Kubernetes are compatible with Amazon EKS.

Amazon EKS automatically manages the availability and scalability of the Kubernetes control plane nodes responsible for scheduling containers, managing application availability, storing cluster data, and other key tasks.

In this blog, I will step you through the process of deploying an nginx web server on EKS cluster.

Pre-requisites

• AWS Account

Step 1: Creating an IAM User with Admin Permissions

• Go to IAM > Users and click on "Add users"

• Specify the username for example k8s-admin, enable Programmatic access, and hit Next.

• Click on Attach existing policies directly and select the AdministratorAccess policy.

• Proceed till the end and click on Create user

• Copy both Access key ID and Secret access key and save them for later use.

Step 2: Launching an EC2 Instance and Configuring the required CLI Tools

In this step, we will start by creating an EC2 instance, updating the AWS CLI version, and configuring the AWS CLI using the credentials of the user created in the previous step. We will then install both eksctl and kubectl on that EC2 instance. This instance will act as an admin workstation to run all administrative commands from.

• Go to EC2 service and click on Launch instance.

• Follow below instructions:

  • Set Name: k8s-admin

  • Select AMI: Amazon Linux 2 AMI

  • Keep the default Instance Type t2.micro

  • Create new key pair with you preferred name and download it (Note: Select .ppk format if you are using Putty)

  • Edit Network Settings and enable Auto-assign public IP

  • Keep other settings as is and click Launch instance

• Wait till the Status check turns into 2/2 checks passed and then click on Connect. Choose EC2 Instance Connect and press on Connect button to access the EC2 instance terminal.

• Follow the instructions from the AWS documentation here or follow the below steps to update the AWS CLI version:

  • Download the latest AWS CLI version

curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip"

• Unzip the installer

unzip awscliv2.zip

• Run following to update the current version:

sudo ./aws/install --bin-dir /usr/bin --install-dir /usr/local/aws-cli --update

• Verify version is updated

aws --version

• Run aws configure and set below values:

  • AWS Acsess Key ID and AWS Secret Access Key from previous step

  • Default Region name: us-east-1

  • Default output format: json

• Install kubectl with following commands:

curl -o kubectl https://amazon-eks.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/1.16.8/2020-04-16/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl
chmod +x ./kubectl
mkdir -p $HOME/bin && cp ./kubectl $HOME/bin/kubectl && export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin

• Ensure kubectl is installed

kubectl version --short --client

• Install and configure eksctl

curl --silent --location "https://github.com/weaveworks/eksctl/releases/latest/download/eksctl_$(uname -s)_amd64.tar.gz" | tar xz -C /tmp
sudo mv /tmp/eksctl /usr/bin

• Ensure eksctl is installed

eksctl version

Step 3: Provisioning an EKS Cluster

• Provision an EKS cluster with three worker nodes in us-east-1

eksctl create cluster --name dev --region us-east-1 --nodegroup-name standard-workers --node-type t3.medium --nodes 3 --nodes-min 1 --nodes-max 4 --managed

It will take 10–15 minutes since it's provisioning the control plane and worker nodes, attaching the worker nodes to the control plane, and creating the VPC, security group, and Auto Scaling group.

• After the process is fully completed, check the cluster status by running the following command

eksctl get cluster

• Enable connecting to the cluster

aws eks update-kubeconfig --name dev --region us-east-1

Step 4: Creating an Nginx Deployment on the EKS Cluster

• Install Git

sudo yum install -y git

• Download the configuration files

git clone https://github.com/noweder/EKS-with-Nginx.git

• Move to the directory with configuration files

cd EKS-with-Nginx

• Create the Load Balancer service

kubectl apply -f ./nginx-svc.yaml

• Check the Load Balancer service status and copy the external DNS hostname of the load balancer, and paste it into a text file for later use

kubectl get service

• Create the deployment of 3 pods (3 Nginx containers)

kubectl apply -f ./nginx-deployment.yaml

• Check the deployment status

kubectl get deployment

• View the created pods

kubectl get pod

• View the ReplicaSets

kubectl get rs

• View the EC2 worker nodes

kubectl get node

• Finally, you can access the Nginx application using the load balancer DNS address previously copied on a web browser, or by running the below command in CLI replacing <LOAD_BALANCER_DNS_HOSTNAME> with your specific Load Balancer DNS address

curl <LOAD_BALANCER_DNS_HOSTNAME>

If you get above results, it means that you have successfully accessed the Nginx application running in container which is deployed in the EKS cluster and exposed to the internet via the load balancer service.

Thank you for reading!