Effortlessly Launch and Manage AWS EKS Clusters with Terraform
Launching and managing an Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) cluster on AWS can be a complex process involving multiple resources like VPCs, IAM roles, and EC2 instances. However, by using Terraform, you can simplify and automate the provisioning, scaling, and management of your EKS infrastructure with ease.
Published Nov 16, 2024
AWS's Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a managed service that lets you deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications on Kubernetes.
In this tutorial, deploy an EKS cluster using Terraform.
Prerequisite :
- To launch VPC before configuring EKS cluster using Terraform, click on the below link
Finally, we have reached the EKS cluster. Kubernetes clusters managed by Amazon EKS make calls to other AWS services on your behalf to manage the resources used with the service. For instance, if you use managed nodes, EKS will automatically create an Auto Scaling group for each instance group.
Before creating Amazon EKS clusters, you need to create an IAM role with the
AmazonEKSClusterPolicy.Let’s name the configuration file
terraform/eks.tf.eks.tf
- Next, we are going to create a single instance group for Kubernetes. Similar to the EKS cluster, it requires an IAM role as well.
nodes.tf
To manage permissions for the applications deployed in your Kubernetes cluster, you have two options.
- Attach Policies to Kubernetes Nodes: You can attach IAM policies directly to the Kubernetes nodes. In this case, all the pods running on those nodes will inherit the same IAM permissions, meaning every pod will have the same level of access to AWS resources.
- Use OpenID Connect (OIDC) Provider: Alternatively, you can create an OpenID Connect (OIDC) provider for your EKS cluster. This method allows you to grant IAM permissions based on the service account associated with each pod. Using service accounts gives you more granular control over the permissions assigned to individual pods, rather than granting permissions at the node level.
The configuration file for this setup will be named
terraform/iam-oidc.tf.iam-oidc.tf
Now we can run terraform.
terraform plan
terraform apply:
Terraform is complete, now we will verify
To export Kubernetes context you can use
aws eks ... command; just replace region and name of the cluster.To check connection to EKS cluster run the following command:
EKS :
IAM Role:
- eks-cluster-demo
- eks-node-group-nodes
- Identity providers
Using Terraform to launch and manage an AWS EKS cluster allows for an automated, scalable, and consistent approach to provisioning Kubernetes clusters on AWS. By following the above steps and practices, you can ensure that your EKS infrastructure is well-architected, secure, and manageable over time.
This approach not only saves time but also provides the flexibility to version control your infrastructure as code, reducing manual errors and simplifying the overall lifecycle management of your Kubernetes environment.