What is Amazon EKS?
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed service that you can use to run Kubernetes on Amazon without needing to install, operate, and maintain your own Kubernetes control plane or nodes. Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Amazon EKS:
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Runs and scales the Kubernetes control plane across multiple Amazon Availability Zones to ensure high availability.
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Automatically scales control plane instances based on load, detects and replaces unhealthy control plane instances, and it provides automated version updates and patching for them.
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Is integrated with many Amazon services to provide scalability and security for your applications, including the following capabilities:
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Amazon ECR for container images
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Elastic Load Balancing for load distribution
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IAM for authentication
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Amazon VPC for isolation
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Runs up-to-date versions of the open-source Kubernetes software, so you can use all of the existing plugins and tooling from the Kubernetes community. Applications that are running on Amazon EKS are fully compatible with applications running on any standard Kubernetes environment, no matter whether they're running in on-premises data centers or public clouds. This means that you can easily migrate any standard Kubernetes application to Amazon EKS without any code modification.
For a list of other features, see Amazon EKS
features
Amazon EKS control plane architecture
Amazon EKS runs a single tenant Kubernetes control plane for each cluster. The control plane
infrastructure isn't shared across clusters or Amazon accounts. The control plane consists of at
least two API server instances and three etcd instances that run across three Availability Zones
within an Amazon Web Services Region. Amazon EKS:
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Actively monitors the load on control plane instances and automatically scales them to ensure high performance.
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Automatically detects and replaces unhealthy control plane instances, restarting them across the Availability Zones within the Amazon Web Services Region as needed.
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Leverages the architecture of Amazon Web Services Regions in order to maintain high availability. Because of this, Amazon EKS is able to offer an SLA for API server endpoint availability
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Amazon EKS uses Amazon VPC network policies to restrict traffic between control plane components to within a single cluster. Control plane components for a cluster can't view or receive communication from other clusters or other Amazon accounts, except as authorized with Kubernetes RBAC policies. This secure and highly available configuration makes Amazon EKS reliable and recommended for production workloads.
How does Amazon EKS work?
Getting started with Amazon EKS is easy:
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Create an Amazon EKS cluster in the Amazon Web Services Management Console or with the Amazon CLI or one of the Amazon SDKs.
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Launch managed or self-managed Amazon EC2 nodes, or deploy your workloads to Amazon Fargate.
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When your cluster is ready, you can configure your favorite Kubernetes tools, such as
kubectl, to communicate with your cluster. -
Deploy and manage workloads on your Amazon EKS cluster the same way that you would with any other Kubernetes environment. You can also view information about your workloads using the Amazon Web Services Management Console.
To create your first cluster and its associated resources, see Getting started with Amazon EKS. To learn about other Kubernetes deployment options, see Deployment options.
Pricing
An Amazon EKS cluster consists of a control plane and the Amazon EC2 or Amazon Fargate compute that you
run Pods on. For more information about pricing for the control plane, see Amazon EKS pricing
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On-Demand Instances – Pay for the instances that you use by the second, with no long-term commitments or upfront payments. For more information, see Amazon EC2 On-Demand Pricing
and Amazon Fargate Pricing .