Set up an Amazon EKS cluster - Amazon EMR
PrerequisitesCreate an Amazon EKS cluster using eksctlCreate an EKS cluster using Amazon Web Services Management Console and Amazon CLICreate an EKS cluster with Amazon Fargate
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Set up an Amazon EKS cluster

Amazon EKS is a managed service that makes it easy for you to run Kubernetes on Amazon without needing to install, operate, and maintain your own Kubernetes control plane or nodes. Follow the steps outlined below to create a new Kubernetes cluster with nodes in Amazon EKS.

Prerequisites

Important

Before you create an Amazon EKS cluster, complete the Amazon EKS VPC and subnet requirements and considerations in the Amazon EKS User Guide to ensure that your Amazon EKS clusters work and scale as expected.

You must install and configure the following tools and resources that you need to create and manage an Amazon EKS cluster:

  • The latest version of Amazon CLI.

  • kubectl version 1.20 or later.

  • The latest version of eksctl .

For more information, see Install the Amazon CLI, Installing kubectl, and Install eksctl.

Create an Amazon EKS cluster using eksctl

Take the following steps to create an Amazon EKS cluster using eksctl.

Important

To get started quickly, you can create an EKS cluster and the nodes with default settings. But for production use, we recommend that you customize the settings for the cluster and nodes to meet your specific requirements. For a list of all settings and options, run the command eksctl create cluster -h. For more information, see Creating and Managing Clusters in the eksctl documentation.

  1. Create an Amazon EC2 key pair.

    If you don't have an existing key pair, you can run the following command to create a new key pair. Replace us-west-2 with the Region where you want to create your cluster. 

    aws ec2 create-key-pair --region us-west-2 --key-name myKeyPair

    Save the returned output in a file on your local computer. For more information, see Creating or importing a key pair in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances.

    Note

    A key pair is not required for creating an EKS cluster. But specifying the key pair allows you to SSH to nodes once they're created. You can specify a key pair only when you create the node group.

  2. Create an EKS cluster.

    Run the following command to create an EKS cluster and nodes. Replace my-cluster and myKeyPair with your own cluster name and key pair name. Replace us-west-2 with the Region where you want to create your cluster. For more information about Amazon EKS supported Regions, see Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service endpoints and quotas. 

    eksctl create cluster \
--name my-cluster \
--region us-west-2 \
--with-oidc \
--ssh-access \
--ssh-public-key myKeyPair \
--instance-types=m5.xlarge \
--managed
    Important

    When creating an EKS cluster, use m5.xlarge as the instance type, or any other instance type with a higher CPU and memory. Using an instance type with lower CPU or memory compared to m5.xlarge may lead to job failure due to insufficient resources available in the cluster. To see all resources created, view the stack named eksctl-my-cluster-cluster in the Amazon Cloud Formation console.

    The cluster and node creation process takes several minutes. You'll see several lines of output when the cluster and nodes are created. The following example demonstrates the last line of output.

    ...
[✓]  EKS cluster "my-cluster" in "us-west-2" region is ready

    eksctl created a kubectl config file in ~/.kube or added the new cluster's configuration within an existing config file in ~/.kube.

  3. View and validate resources

    Run the following command to view your cluster nodes.

    kubectl get nodes -o wide

    The following shows an example output.

    Amazon EC2 node output

NAME                                           STATUS   ROLES    AGE    VERSION              INTERNAL-IP      EXTERNAL-IP     OS-IMAGE         KERNEL-VERSION                  CONTAINER-RUNTIME
ip-192-168-12-49.us-west-2.compute.internal    Ready    none     6m7s   v1.18.9-eks-d1db3c   192.168.12.49    52.35.116.65    Amazon Linux 2   4.14.209-160.335.amzn2.x86_64   docker://19.3.6
ip-192-168-72-129.us-west-2.compute.internal   Ready    none     6m4s   v1.18.9-eks-d1db3c   192.168.72.129   44.242.140.21   Amazon Linux 2   4.14.209-160.335.amzn2.x86_64   docker://19.3.6

    For more information, see View nodes.

    Use the following command to view the workloads running on your cluster.

    kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -o wide

    The following shows an example output.

    Amazon EC2 output

NAMESPACE     NAME                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE     IP               NODE                                           NOMINATED NODE   READINESS GATES
kube-system   aws-node-6ctpm             1/1     Running   0          7m43s   192.168.72.129   ip-192-168-72-129.us-west-2.compute.internal   none             none
kube-system   aws-node-cbntg             1/1     Running   0          7m46s   192.168.12.49    ip-192-168-12-49.us-west-2.compute.internal    none             none
kube-system   coredns-559b5db75d-26t47   1/1     Running   0          14m     192.168.78.81    ip-192-168-72-129.us-west-2.compute.internal   none             none
kube-system   coredns-559b5db75d-9rvnk   1/1     Running   0          14m     192.168.29.248   ip-192-168-12-49.us-west-2.compute.internal    none             none
kube-system   kube-proxy-l8pbd           1/1     Running   0          7m46s   192.168.12.49    ip-192-168-12-49.us-west-2.compute.internal    none             none
kube-system   kube-proxy-zh85h           1/1     Running   0          7m43s   192.168.72.129   ip-192-168-72-129.us-west-2.compute.internal   none             none

    For more information about what you see here, see View workloads.

Create an EKS cluster using Amazon Web Services Management Console and Amazon CLI

You can also use Amazon Web Services Management Console and Amazon CLI to create an EKS cluster. Follow the steps at Getting started with Amazon EKS – Amazon Web Services Management Console and Amazon CLI. This way gives you visibility into how each resource is created for the EKS cluster and how the resources interact with each other.

Important

When creating nodes for an EKS cluster, use m5.xlarge as the instance type, or any other instance type with a higher CPU and memory.

Create an EKS cluster with Amazon Fargate

You can also create an EKS cluster with pods running on Amazon Fargate.

  1. To create an EKS cluster with pods running on Fargate, follow the steps outlined at Getting Started with Amazon Fargate using Amazon EKS.

    Note

    Amazon EMR on EKS needs CoreDNS for running jobs on EKS cluster. If you want to run your pods only on Fargate, you must follow the steps at Updating CoreDNS.

  2. Run the following command to view your cluster nodes.

    kubectl get nodes -o wide

    The following shows an example Fargate output.

    Fargate node output

NAME                                                    STATUS   ROLES    AGE     VERSION              INTERNAL-IP       EXTERNAL-IP   OS-IMAGE         KERNEL-VERSION                  CONTAINER-RUNTIME
fargate-ip-192-168-141-147.us-west-2.compute.internal   Ready    none     8m3s    v1.18.8-eks-7c9bda   192.168.141.147   none          Amazon Linux 2   4.14.209-160.335.amzn2.x86_64   containerd://1.3.2
fargate-ip-192-168-164-53.us-west-2.compute.internal    Ready    none     7m30s   v1.18.8-eks-7c9bda   192.168.164.53    none          Amazon Linux 2   4.14.209-160.335.amzn2.x86_64   containerd://1.3.2

    For more information, see View nodes.

  3. Run the following command to view the workloads running on your cluster.

    kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -o wide

    The following shows an example Fargate output.

    Fargate output

NAMESPACE     NAME                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE   IP                NODE                                                    NOMINATED NODE   READINESS GATES
kube-system   coredns-69dfb8f894-9z95l   1/1     Running   0          18m   192.168.164.53    fargate-ip-192-168-164-53.us-west-2.compute.internal    none             none
kube-system   coredns-69dfb8f894-c8v66   1/1     Running   0          18m   192.168.141.147   fargate-ip-192-168-141-147.us-west-2.compute.internal   none             none

    For more information, see View workloads.