Hey everyone, I wanted to share with you all something I've been exploring within the cloud services infrastructure that I am truly passionate about Amazon EKS, also known as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service. If you have been wanting to leverage Kubernetes within AWS but have been deterred by the complexity of setup, this article is written for you

What is Amazon EKS?

To break it down into simpler terms: the Amazon EKS service is essentially the managed Kubernetes service offered by AWS. It is almost as if AWS is handling the whole heavy lifting of Kubernetes itself so that you are left with the liberty of concentrating on application management.

EKS is essentially a system that makes it easier to manage your applications running in containers hosted across multiple machines. The interesting part about this is that, while creating your own EKS clusters is not very easy, EKS is exactly what you need. EKS takes care of things like master node setup, high availability, security patches, and upgrade tasks.

What Makes EKS Special?

My exploration of EKS has revealed the following salient features:

Fully Managed Control Plane: The control plane process in Kubernetes is automatically handled by AWS across various availability zones. This enhances reliability with less effort on your part to design this yourself.

Smooth Integration with AWS: EKS integrates seamlessly well with other AWS services like IAM for auth, VPC for networking, and ELB for balancing loads. Imagine how easily you can work while building cloud native applications.

Security Baked In: When you think about it, security is essentially baked in here because of automatic encryption, its tie to IAM, and VPCs. You also get automatic security patches for your control plane.

Flexibility with Compute Options: Instance options for computing, AWS Fargate with serverless containers, and EKS Anywhere, aimed at extending services to premises, give you the opportunity to run your compute workloads anywhere. This is an important factor, given your needs may vary.

How It Helps Us as Developers and DevOps Engineers

It’s at this stage that things become more practical. As someone keen on efficiency, I appreciate the way EKS resolves some of the key pain points for people like me:

You have fewer activities related to infrastructure maintenance and more related to application development. The learning curve here isn’t as steep since if you know Kubernetes already, you’ll pretty much need no learning. You will not be locked into AWS-specific services either since you can use standard Kubernetes services and configurations.

Another advantage is that EKS is scalable. Your applications will be able to scale from a few users to thousands without you having to redesign your architecture. EKS scales the control plane automatically.

In terms of cost, you will be responsible for paying for the EKS control plane only and the compute resources that you actually consume. This does not require overprovisioning, and this can result in some cost savings.

Getting Started with EKS

Are you ready to give EKS a test drive? Here's the simplified step-by-step plan to get started

First, ensure that you have both AWS CLI and kubectl installed on your machine. Additionally, you should install eksctl, which is a command line utility specifically built to make creating an EKS cluster simpler.

Creating your first cluster can be as simple as:

eksctl create cluster --name my-first-cluster --region us-east-1

This single command launches a whole EKS cluster with worker nodes. It is almost magical to see the amount of complexity abstracted away.

Once your cluster is up, you can then deploy applications by using standard Kubernetes manifests. This is a very familiar experience if you're used to running applications via Kubernetes, but without all of the management overhead.

The AWS documentation is comprehensive, and there is an active and supportive community for EKS. Do not be afraid to dive into the official tutorials and guides because they really are helpful resources.

Final Thoughts

Finding about Amazon EKS has been an eye-opening experience for me. It is an excellent platform that provides you the ability and flexibility of Kubernetes, taking away all the operational hassles from it.

Whether you are running microservices, batch jobs, or machine learning workloads, EKS gets you off to a strong start. And the best part? It scales alongside your maturing demands.

If you’ve been looking at Kubernetes for your workloads that run on AWS, I would say you should definitely give EKS a whirl. Just start with a tiny application and see what it feels like. The hurdle is not that high.

Would love to hear about your experience with EKS or questions you have. Feel free to provide your thoughts below via comments. Happy cloud building!

What is your favorite part about EKS, or what might be keeping you from trying EKS? Let's discuss!