Next steps for Kubernetes on Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Welcome to the Next Steps for your Kubernetes cluster.

This guide is for Kubernetes Quick Start admins and users. This guide assumes you have deployed the Kubernetes Quick Start, either by walking through Amazon’s Quick Start PDF, which uses Amazon’s CloudFormation console, or Heptio’s walkthrough, which uses the AWS CLI to deploy Kubernetes from the command line.

Now that you have your Kubernetes stack on Amazon, we recommend setting up WordPress with Helm as a demo application to explore your new cluster.

Note

This stack is appropriate for proof of concept (PoC), experimentation, development, and small internal-facing projects. Consider this a test drive.

This stack does not currently support upgrades and must be rebuilt for new versions.

If you’re looking for a more mature build today, please check out kops.

Release notes

Release notes: AWS Quick Start for Kubernetes by Heptio

The Quick Start builds Kubernetes 1.6.4.

Next steps

If you’ve completed the Kubernetes Quick Start on AWS, we recommend that you try these next steps:

Explore your cluster and deploy a demo application: WordPress with Helm
Allow traffic: Allow outside traffic to your cluster with load balancing
Configure high availability: Launch a second cluster in a second Availability Zone to make your setup highly available

Additional resources

Heptio has collected some links to help you explore your Kubernetes cluster:

Bitnami shows how to deploy a MEAN stack: Deploy, Scale And Upgrade An Application On Kubernetes With Helm
Bitnami manages a library of Kubernetes-ready applications
Project Calico goes into detail on networking for Kubernetes: Calico for Kubernetes

Architecture and decisions

This CloudFormation template (download) (launch) creates two stacks: one that builds a wrapper virtual private cloud (VPC), and one that deploys the Kubernetes cluster into it. For advanced AWS users, you can deploy just the Kubernetes stack into your existing AWS architecture. This architecture list is for the template that creates a new VPC for your Kubernetes cluster.

The Quick Start builds Kubernetes 1.6.4.

A VPC in a single Availability Zone
2 subnets, one public and one private
1 EC2 instance acting as a bastion host in the public subnet
1 EC2 instance with automatic recovery for the master node in the private subnet
1-20 EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling Group for additional nodes in the private subnet (2 with default settings)
1 ELB load balancer for HTTPS access to the Kubernetes API
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS for all nodes; the base image is a custom AMI based on Ubuntu 16.04
40 GiB of disk for the EC2 instances
kubeadm for bootstrapping Kubernetes on Linux
Docker for the container runtime, which Kubernetes depends on
Calico or Weave for pod networking
One stack-only security group that allows port 22 for SSH access from the bastion host, port 6443 for HTTPS access to the API, and inter-node connectivity on all ports

The templates are built for CloudFormation.

Help and support

Visit our help page for assistance with the AWS Kubernetes Quick Start.