Deploying Your Application to Amazon EKS with GitHub Actions and Weave Flux

Last month I've published a tutorial to show you how to build and push a docker image to Amazon ECR with GitHub Actions. However, if you are using Amazon EKS, you may need to manually update the image URI every time you have a new release. is there a way to automate the whole process that the image URI can be updated automatically? Yes. Here's the solution for you. Flux is the operator that makes GitOps happen in your cluster. It ensures that the cluster config matches the one in git and automates your deployments. Suppose you've already provisioned your Amazon EKS cluster. If not, please check out my previous post. Configure your kubectl so that you can connect to an Amazon EKS cluster by running ```bash export AWS_REGION="ap-southeast-1" export CLUSTER_NAME="your-cluster-name" aws eks --region ${AWS_REGION} update-kubeconfig --name ${CLUSTER_NAME} ``` If you enable load balancer ingress access, make sure that you have the corresponding IAM role. ```bash aws iam get-role --role-name "AWSServiceRoleForElasticLoadBalancing" || aws iam create-service-linked-role --aws-service-name "elasticloadbalancing.amazonaws.com" ``` Run your manifest files ```bash kubectl apply -f manifests/deployment.yaml kubectl apply -f manifests/service.yaml kubectl apply -f manifests/ingress.yaml ``` A sample deployment can be found [here](https://github.com/github-developer/example-actions-flux-eks/blob/master/manifests/deployment.yml). Make sure you have ``fluxcd.io/automated: "true"`` under ``annotations``. The next step is to run Flux on our EKS cluster. Let's create a new namespace ``flux`` in where flux objects will be installed. ```bash kubectl create ns flux ``` Install flux objects under ``flux`` namespace. By doing so, flux is monitoring the manifests folder for the changes. ```bash export GHUSER=your-github-user export GHREPO=your-github-repo fluxctl install \ --git-user=${GHUSER} \ --git-email=${GHUSER}@users.noreply.github.com \ --git-url=git@github.com:${GHUSER}/${GHREPO} \ --git-path=manifests \ --namespace=flux | kubectl apply -f - ``` You should see the following ```bash serviceaccount/flux created clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/flux unchanged clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/flux configured deployment.apps/flux created secret/flux-git-deploy created deployment.apps/memcached created service/memcached created ``` Let's verify if they are running or not ```bash kubectl get all -n flux ``` ```bash NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE pod/flux-6449c6bd94-7gz88 1/1 Running 0 5m pod/memcached-86869f57fd-52cwn 1/1 Running 0 5m NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE service/memcached ClusterIP 10.100.152.74 11211/TCP 5m NAME READY UP-TO-DATE AVAILABLE AGE deployment.apps/flux 1/1 1 1 5m deployment.apps/memcached 1/1 1 1 5m NAME DESIRED CURRENT READY AGE replicaset.apps/flux-6449c6bd94 1 1 0 5m replicaset.apps/memcached-86869f57fd 1 1 1 5m ``` Upon the completion of deployment, the docker image URI in deployment.yaml should be updated. To do so, we need to grand read/write access to the repository with a deploy key so that Flux can be able to write it back every time it deploys. By running ```bash fluxctl identity --k8s-fwd-ns flux ``` You should get a deploy key. ```bash ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQC64WoWesnPneyDqq8ddTAAOKSaLHcu+0ALL8xxtGdnbK2WG99OZ7A9cq24Y9TmSL4gIuXb0HDvwhHsnbkTNsFmVWpO9xS/T3bqhLzhdQwLCGP21ckhRVF7RBv+pK6PnenY4ZjTRkW5h7SxYnunEarj/9E9NlL/JP8tDnb53liDXF4AB1y3Xi/nKwjlgwkGGrSBXGSRij7a6uq2iMlGF/H9MmHn8ct7w/dd/RF6VN4phbNpsVfnBVu1yDgRJTNKznXDOCEEAfflxAFrDWjbAsXwCxvWLNsbP5HtMTf5Ep/Eba7ZAjZ7XnWYLgoXRZHOf+0WYqn1EfsSot5pb01TFeYr ``` Go to Settings > Deploy keys and click 'Add deploy key'  Enter the title and the key you just generated. Make sure you tick 'Allow write access'  Then we can go back to the console and run the following command to sync Flux and Github. ```bash fluxctl sync --k8s-fwd-ns flux ``` For the first time, you should see ```bash Synchronizing with git@github.com:wingkwong/eks-flux-playground Revision of master to apply is a8e3b45 Waiting for a8e3b45 to be applied ... Done. ``` If you make a change and push to master, Github Actions helps to build and push the docker image to Amazon ECR, and Flux helps to deploy the latest image to Amazon EKS. Go back to the repository, you should see there is a new commit on your deployment.yaml while the change is only updating the image URI. ```bash Auto-release xxxxxxxxxxxx.dkr.ecr.ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/eks-flux…