Creating an EKS Cluster in AWS Using eksctl

In this article, we will create an EKS Cluster in AWS using eksctl.

eksctl is a simple CLI tool for creating clusters on EKS - Amazon's new managed Kubernetes service for EC2. It is written in Go, and uses CloudFormation.

This is the general architecture. This article only focuses on EKS part.

To install eksctl, you can use homebrew if you are a macOS user:

brew tap weaveworks/tap
brew install weaveworks/tap/eksctl

or use chocolatey if you are a Windows user:

chocolatey install eksctl

Before creating a cluster, make sure you have setup your aws credentials. To do that, you can run aws configure to perform your setup. The region for this demostration is us-east-1.

After the configuration setup, you can run the below command to verify

aws sts get-caller-identity

To create a EKS cluster, you can simply use

eksctl create cluster

or with some parameters

eksctl create cluster --region=us-east-1 --node-type=t2.medium

If you don't specify parameters, the default parameters will be used:

exciting auto-generated name, e.g. "fabulous-mushroom-1527688624"
2x m5.large nodes (this instance type suits most common use-cases, and is good value for money)
use official AWS EKS AMI
us-west-2 region
dedicated VPC (check your quotas)
using static AMI resolver

The process may take up to 15 minutes.

Once it is ready, run the following command to verify

kubectl get nodes

NAME                             STATUS   ROLES    AGE    VERSION
ip-192-168-10-12.ec2.internal    Ready    <none>   2m6s   v1.14.7-eks-1861c5
ip-192-168-41-124.ec2.internal   Ready    <none>   2m5s   v1.14.7-eks-1861c5

If you go to AWS Console and direct to EKS page, you can see there are three clusters created by eksctl. Since we do not specify the name, so the cluster name is generated randomly.

For the eksctl documentation, please check out here.