Book Image

Mastering Elastic Kubernetes Service on AWS

By : Malcolm Orr, Yang-Xin Cao (Eason)
5 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Elastic Kubernetes Service on AWS

5 (1)
By: Malcolm Orr, Yang-Xin Cao (Eason)

Overview of this book

Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto standard for container orchestration, with recent developments making it easy to deploy and handle a Kubernetes cluster. However, a few challenges such as networking, load balancing, monitoring, and security remain. To address these issues, Amazon EKS offers a managed Kubernetes service to improve the performance, scalability, reliability, and availability of AWS infrastructure and integrate with AWS networking and security services with ease. You’ll begin by exploring the fundamentals of Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon EKS, and its architecture along with different ways to set up EKS. Next, you’ll find out how to manage Amazon EKS, encompassing security, cluster authentication, networking, and cluster version upgrades. As you advance, you’ll discover best practices and learn to deploy applications on Amazon EKS through different use cases, including pushing images to ECR and setting up storage and load balancing. With the help of several actionable practices and scenarios, you’ll gain the know-how to resolve scaling and monitoring issues. Finally, you will overcome the challenges in EKS by developing the right skill set to troubleshoot common issues with the right logic. By the end of this Kubernetes book, you’ll be able to effectively manage your own Kubernetes clusters and other components on AWS.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with Amazon EKS
7
Part 2: Deep Dive into EKS
13
Part 3: Deploying an Application on EKS
20
Part 4: Advanced EKS Service Mesh and Scaling
24
Part 5: Overcoming Common EKS Challenges

Summary

In this chapter, we explored how AWS API permissions can be assigned to EC2 instances (worker nodes) and Pods using instance profiles and IMDS. We also noted that by default, EKS Pods inherit the permissions assigned to the worker nodes they run on, and how this may not be a good thing, as we are not observing a least-privilege model since many Pods may not need any AWS API access.

We discussed how IMDSv2 can be used to reduce the use of worker permission and should be used with IRSA to limit the worker node permission inheritance. We then worked through how to configure and use IRSA from the command line and how IaC tools such as eksctl can simplify the process significantly. Finally, we looked at how to do some basic troubleshooting of AWS IAM permission issues, working backward from the Kubernetes SA.

In the next chapter, we will look at how we can use AWS load balancers to make our Kubernetes services more resilient and scalable.