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

Understanding Helm and its architecture

As we saw in the previous chapters, Kubernetes YAML templates are fine for simple applications. However, as you try and cope with complex applications where you have multiple components, several dependencies between these components, and the need to deploy and update these components frequently using techniques such as blue/green deployments, you need something more; you need a package manager.

Package management is not a new idea; you can see a similar concept and critical software package management tools in software such as APT/YUM on Linux, Homebrew on Mac, or Chocolatey on Windows. Similarly, Helm can be considered the package management tool for Kubernetes.

Helm is composed of the following:

  • Charts: A package of pre-configured Kubernetes resources
  • Releases: A specific instance of a chart that has been deployed to the cluster using Helm
  • Repositories: A group of published charts that can be made available to others
  • ...