Finally finally, EKS is now generally available. It took roughly half year to arrive here since the announcement in last ReInvent.
If you ever used kops before, then you will feel that the way how they build k8s cluster is very similar. Except that AWS manages the master nodes for you. I had quick look at EKS, here are some key points:
- AWS manages the k8s masters (they call it control panel nodes) for you, which includes HA, patching, upgrading and monitoring etc. User manages their own work nodes.
- EKS use Heptio authenticator for authentication which integrates with IAM (this is good! I would like to try it in my own k8s as well).
- Similar to kops, EKS uses ELB for load balancing.
- Similar to kops, EKS can build k8s cluster in existing VPC or create a new VPC. The best practise is to have a dedicated VPC for each k8s cluster.
- EKS supports native VPC networking via CNI plugin (Be careful with that if you have a small VPC).
- With Virtual Kubelet, it is possible to connect Kubernets to other AWS services API (this is new to me).
References:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-eks-now-generally-available/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-elastic-container-service-for-kubernetes/
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/what-is-eks.html
https://rancher.com/blog/2018/managing-eks-clusters-with-rancher/
Jackie Chen's IT Workshop 