AWS - EKS

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a fully managed Kubernetes service.

Kubernetes is open source software that allows you to deploy and manage containerized applications at scale. Kubernetes manages clusters of Amazon EC2 compute instances and runs containers on those instances with processes for deployment, maintenance, and scaling.

AWS makes it easy to run Kubernetes. You can choose to manage Kubernetes infrastructure yourself with Amazon EC2 or get an automatically provisioned, managed Kubernetes control plane with Amazon EKS.

How Amazon EKS Works

The simplest way to look at EKS is that it’s AWS’ offering for Kubernetes-as-a-service. As mentioned, EKS significantly simplifies the management and maintenance of highly-available Kubernetes clusters in AWS.

Amazon EKS: Two Main Components

In each EKS cluster are two main components

1. Control Plane.
2. Worker Nodes.

Control Plane

The Control Plane consists of three Kubernetes master nodes that run in three different availability zones (AZs).

All incoming traffic to Kubernetes API comes through the network load balancer (NLB).

It runs on the virtual private cloud controlled by Amazon. Hence, the Control Panel can’t be managed directly by the organization and is fully managed by AWS.

Worker Nodes

Worner Nodes run on the Amazon EC2 instances in the virtual private cloud controlled by the organization. Any instance in AWS can be used as a worker node. These worker nodes can be accessed through SSH or provisioned without automation.

A cluster of worker nodes runs an organization’s containers while the control plane manages and monitors when and where containers are started.

Due to the flexibility of the EKS layout, organizations can deploy a Kubernetes cluster (an EKS cluster) for each application. Organizations can also use just one EKS cluster to run more than one application via Kubernetes namespaces and AWS IAM configurations.

AWS EKS: How It Works

Organizations can granularly control access permissions to Kubernetes masters by assigning RBAC roles directly to IAM entities. By doing this, you can easily manage Kubernetes clusters through standard tools like kubectl.

Benefits

1. Scalability
2. Managed Kubernete
3. Integration with AWS Services
4. Security and Compliance
5. Cost Optimization