Install Calico Stars policy demo Remove Calico

Installing the Calico add-on

Project Calico is a network policy engine for Kubernetes. With Calico network policy enforcement, you can implement network segmentation and tenant isolation. This is useful in multi-tenant environments where you must isolate tenants from each other or when you want to create separate environments for development, staging, and production. Network policies are similar to Amazon security groups in that you can create network ingress and egress rules. Instead of assigning instances to a security group, you assign network policies to pods using pod selectors and labels.

Considerations

Calico is not supported when using Fargate with Amazon EKS.
Calico adds rules to iptables on the node that may be higher priority than existing rules that you've already implemented outside of Calico. Consider adding existing iptables rules to your Calico policies to avoid having rules outside of Calico policy overridden by Calico.
If you're using the Amazon VPC CNI add-on version 1.10 or earlier, security groups for pods traffic flow to pods on branch network interfaces is not subjected to Calico network policy enforcement and is limited to Amazon EC2 security group enforcement only. If you're using 1.11.0 or later of the Amazon VPC CNI add-on, traffic flow to pods on branch network interfaces is subject to Calico network policy enforcement if you set POD_SECURITY_GROUP_ENFORCING_MODE=standard for the Amazon VPC CNI add-on.

Prerequisites

An existing Amazon EKS cluster. To deploy one, see Getting started with Amazon EKS.
The kubectl command line tool installed on your computer or Amazon CloudShell. The version must be the same, or up to two versions later than your cluster version. To install or upgrade kubectl, see Installing kubectl.

The following procedure shows you how to install Calico on Linux nodes in your Amazon EKS cluster. To install Calico on Windows nodes, see Using Calico on Amazon EKS Windows Containers.

Install Calico on your Amazon EKS Linux nodes

Important

Amazon EKS doesn't maintain the manifests or charts used in the following procedures. The recommended way to install Calico on Amazon EKS is by using the Calico Operator instead of these charts or manifests. For more information, see Important Announcement: Amazon EKS will no longer maintain and update Calico charts in this repository on GitHub. If you encounter issues during installation and usage of Calico, submit issues to Calico Operator and the Calico project directly. You should always contact Tigera for compatibility of any new Calico operator and Calico versions before installing them on your cluster.

You can install Calico using the procedure for Helm or manifests.

Helm

Prerequisite

Helm version 3.0 or later installed on your computer. To install or upgrade Helm, see Using Helm with Amazon EKS.

To install Calico with Helm

Add Project Calico into your Helm repository.


helm repo add projectcalico https://docs.projectcalico.org/charts

If you already have Calico added, you may want to update it to get the latest released version.
```
helm repo update                         
```
Install version 3.21.4 or later of the Tigera Calico operator and custom resource definitions.
```
helm install calico projectcalico/tigera-operator --version v3.21.4
```

View the resources in the tigera-operator namespace.


kubectl get all -n tigera-operator

Example output:

The values in the DESIRED and READY columns for the replicaset should match. The values returned for you are different than the values in the following output.


NAME                                  READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
pod/tigera-operator-c4b9549c7-h4zp5   1/1     Running   0          110m
...
NAME                                        DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
replicaset.apps/tigera-operator-c4b9549c7   1         1         1       2m35s

View the resources in the calico-system namespace.


kubectl get all -n calico-system

Example output:

The values in the DESIRED and READY columns for the calico-node DaemonSet should match. The values in the DESIRED and READY columns for the two replicasets should also match. The values returned for you are different than the values in the following output.


NAME                                          READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
pod/calico-kube-controllers-579b45dcf-z5tsf   1/1     Running   0          100m
pod/calico-node-v9dhf                         1/1     Running   0          100m
pod/calico-typha-6f9c6786d-f2mc7              1/1     Running   0          100m
...
NAME                                    DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   NODE SELECTOR              AGE
daemonset.apps/calico-node              1         1         1       1            1           kubernetes.io/os=linux     100m
...
NAME                                                DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
replicaset.apps/calico-kube-controllers-579b45dcf   1         1         1       100m
replicaset.apps/calico-typha-6f9c6786d              1         1         1       100m

Confirm that the logs for one of your calico-node, calico-typha, and tigera-operator pods don't contain ERROR. Replace the values in the following commands with the values returned in your output for the previous steps.
```
kubectl logs tigera-operator-c4b9549c7-h4zp5 -n tigera-operator | grep ERROR
kubectl logs calico-node-v9dhf -n calico-system | grep ERROR
kubectl logs calico-typha-6f9c6786d-f2mc7 -n calico-system | grep ERROR
```
If no output is returned from the previous commands, then ERROR doesn't exist in your logs and everything should be running correctly.

Manifests

To install Calico using manifests

Apply the Calico manifests to your cluster. These manifests create a DaemonSet in the calico-system namespace.


kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aws/amazon-vpc-cni-k8s/master/config/master/calico-operator.yaml
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aws/amazon-vpc-cni-k8s/master/config/master/calico-crs.yaml

View the resources in the calico-system namespace.


kubectl get daemonset calico-node --namespace calico-system

Example output:

The values in the DESIRED and READY columns should match. The values returned for you are different than the values in the following output.


NAME          DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   NODE SELECTOR            AGE
calico-node   1         1         1       1            1           kubernetes.io/os=linux   26m

Stars policy demo

This section walks through the Stars policy demo provided by the Project Calico documentation and isn't necessary for Calico functionality on your cluster. The demo creates a front-end, back-end, and client service on your Amazon EKS cluster. The demo also creates a management graphical user interface that shows the available ingress and egress paths between each service. We recommend that you complete the demo on a cluster that you don't run production workloads on.

Before you create any network policies, all services can communicate bidirectionally. After you apply the network policies, you can see that the client can only communicate with the front-end service, and the back-end only accepts traffic from the front-end.

To run the Stars policy demo

Apply the front-end, back-end, client, and management user interface services:


kubectl apply -f https://docs.projectcalico.org/v3.5/getting-started/kubernetes/tutorials/stars-policy/manifests/00-namespace.yaml
kubectl apply -f https://docs.projectcalico.org/v3.5/getting-started/kubernetes/tutorials/stars-policy/manifests/01-management-ui.yaml
kubectl apply -f https://docs.projectcalico.org/v3.5/getting-started/kubernetes/tutorials/stars-policy/manifests/02-backend.yaml
kubectl apply -f https://docs.projectcalico.org/v3.5/getting-started/kubernetes/tutorials/stars-policy/manifests/03-frontend.yaml
kubectl apply -f https://docs.projectcalico.org/v3.5/getting-started/kubernetes/tutorials/stars-policy/manifests/04-client.yaml

View all pods on the cluster.


kubectl get pods -A

Example output:

In your output, you should see pods in the namespaces shown in the following output. Your pod NAMES and the number of pods in the READY column are different than those in the following output. Don't continue until you see pods with similar names and they all have Running in the STATUS column.


NAMESPACE         NAME                                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
...
client            client-xlffc                               1/1     Running   0          5m19s
...
management-ui     management-ui-qrb2g                        1/1     Running   0          5m24s
stars             backend-sz87q                              1/1     Running   0          5m23s
stars             frontend-cscnf                             1/1     Running   0          5m21s
...

To connect to the management user interface, forward your local port 9001 to the management-ui service running on your cluster:
```
kubectl port-forward service/management-ui -n management-ui 9001
```
Open a browser on your local system and point it to http://localhost:9001/. You should see the management user interface. The C node is the client service, the F node is the front-end service, and the B node is the back-end service. Each node has full communication access to all other nodes, as indicated by the bold, colored lines.

Apply the following network policies to isolate the services from each other:


kubectl apply -n stars -f https://docs.projectcalico.org/v3.5/getting-started/kubernetes/tutorials/stars-policy/policies/default-deny.yaml
kubectl apply -n client -f https://docs.projectcalico.org/v3.5/getting-started/kubernetes/tutorials/stars-policy/policies/default-deny.yaml

Refresh your browser. You see that the management user interface can no longer reach any of the nodes, so they don't show up in the user interface.

Apply the following network policies to allow the management user interface to access the services:


kubectl apply -f https://docs.projectcalico.org/v3.5/getting-started/kubernetes/tutorials/stars-policy/policies/allow-ui.yaml
kubectl apply -f https://docs.projectcalico.org/v3.5/getting-started/kubernetes/tutorials/stars-policy/policies/allow-ui-client.yaml

Refresh your browser. You see that the management user interface can reach the nodes again, but the nodes cannot communicate with each other.

Apply the following network policy to allow traffic from the front-end service to the back-end service:


kubectl apply -f https://docs.projectcalico.org/v3.5/getting-started/kubernetes/tutorials/stars-policy/policies/backend-policy.yaml

Refresh your browser. You see that the front-end can communicate with the back-end.

Apply the following network policy to allow traffic from the client to the front-end service.


kubectl apply -f https://docs.projectcalico.org/v3.5/getting-started/kubernetes/tutorials/stars-policy/policies/frontend-policy.yaml

Refresh your browser. You see that the client can communicate to the front-end service. The front-end service can still communicate to the back-end service.
(Optional) When you are done with the demo, you can delete its resources.
```
kubectl delete -f https://docs.projectcalico.org/v3.5/getting-started/kubernetes/tutorials/stars-policy/manifests/04-client.yaml
kubectl delete -f https://docs.projectcalico.org/v3.5/getting-started/kubernetes/tutorials/stars-policy/manifests/03-frontend.yaml
kubectl delete -f https://docs.projectcalico.org/v3.5/getting-started/kubernetes/tutorials/stars-policy/manifests/02-backend.yaml
kubectl delete -f https://docs.projectcalico.org/v3.5/getting-started/kubernetes/tutorials/stars-policy/manifests/01-management-ui.yaml
kubectl delete -f https://docs.projectcalico.org/v3.5/getting-started/kubernetes/tutorials/stars-policy/manifests/00-namespace.yaml
```
Even after deleting the resources, there can still be iptables rules on the nodes that might interfere in unexpected ways with networking in your cluster. The only sure way to remove Calico is to terminate all of the nodes and recycle them. To terminate all nodes, either set the Auto Scaling Group desired count to 0, then back up to the desired number, or just terminate the nodes. If you are unable to recycle the nodes, then see Disabling and removing Calico Policy in the Calico GitHub repository for a last resort procedure.

Remove Calico

Remove Calico using the method that you installed Calico with.

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Managing kube-proxy add-on

Workloads