Create EKS Cluster

In this section, we will be creating our EKS manifest file and deploying our cluster with eksctl.

Create EKS manifest

If you want to use SSH key created in the previous step, uncomment the lines under the ssh section.

# create EKS manifest file
cat > configs/tigera-workshop.yaml << EOF
apiVersion: eksctl.io/v1alpha5
kind: ClusterConfig
metadata:
  name: "tigera-workshop"
  region: "${AWS_REGION}"
  version: "${EKS_VERSION}"

availabilityZones: ["${AZS[0]}", "${AZS[1]}", "${AZS[2]}"]

managedNodeGroups:
- name: "nix-t3-large"
  desiredCapacity: 3
  # choose proper size for worker node instance as the node size detemines the number of pods that a node can run
  # it's limited by a max number of interfeces and private IPs per interface
  # t3.large has max 3 interfaces and allows up to 12 IPs per interface, therefore can run up to 36 pods per node
  # see: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-eni.html#AvailableIpPerENI
  instanceType: "t3.large"
  ssh:
    # uncomment the lines below to allow SSH access to the nodes using existing EC2 key pair
    # publicKeyName: ${KEYPAIR_NAME}
    # allow: true

# enable all of the control plane logs:
cloudWatch:
  clusterLogging:
    enableTypes: ["*"]
EOF

  1. Use eksctl to create EKS cluster.

    eksctl create cluster -f configs/tigera-workshop.yaml

  2. View EKS cluster.

    Once cluster is created you can list it using eksctl.

    eksctl get cluster tigera-workshop

  3. Test access to EKS cluster with kubectl

    Once the EKS cluster is provisioned with eksctl tool, the kubeconfig file would be placed into ~/.kube/config path. The kubectl CLI looks for kubeconfig at ~/.kube/config path or into KUBECONFIG env var.

    # verify kubeconfig file path
ls ~/.kube/config
# test cluster connection
kubectl get nodes