Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service

This deployment guide shows you how to set up an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Engine (EKS) cluster on which Coder can deploy.

Prerequisites

Please make sure that you have the following utilities installed on your machine:

• kubectl
• AWS command-line interface (you'll also need to configure the command-line interface to interact with your AWS account; consider AWS' CLI configuration quickstart to fast-track this process
• eksctl command-line utility

Step 1: Create an EKS cluster

While flags can be passed to eksctl create cluster, the following example uses an eksctl configuration file to define the EKS cluster.

The cluster name, region, and SSH key path will be specific to your installation.

apiVersion: eksctl.io/v1alpha5
kind: ClusterConfig

metadata:
  name: coder-trial-cluster
  region: us-east-1

managedNodeGroups:
  - name: managed-ng-1
    instanceType: t2.medium
    amiFamily: Ubuntu2004
    desiredCapacity: 1
    minSize: 1
    maxSize: 2
    volumeSize: 100
    ssh:
      allow: true
      publicKeyPath: ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

This example uses t2.medium instance with 2 nodes which is meant for a small trial deployment. Depending on your needs, you can choose a larger size instead. See our documentation on resources and requirements for help estimating your cluster size.

If your developers require Docker commands like docker build, docker run, and docker-compose as part of their development flow, then container-based virtual machines (CVMs) are required. In this case, we recommend using the Ubuntu2004 AMI family, as the AmazonLinux2 AMI family does not meet the requirements for cached CVMs.

Once the file is ready, run the following command to create the cluster:

eksctl create cluster -f cluster.yaml

This process may take ~15-30 minutes to complete since it is creating EC2 instance(s) aka node(s), node pool, a VPC, NAT Gateway, network interface, security group, elastic IP, EKS cluster, namespaces and pods.

By default, EKS creates a volumeBindingMode of WaitForFirstConsumer. See the Kubernetes docs for more information on this mode. Coder accepts both Immediate and WaitForFirstConsumer.

When your cluster is ready, you should see the following message:

EKS cluster "YOUR CLUSTER NAME" in "YOUR REGION" region is ready

Step 2: (Optional) Install Calico onto your cluster

AWS uses Calico to implement network segmentation and tenant isolation. For production deployments, we recommend Calico to enforce workspace pod isolation; please see Network Policies for more information.

1. Apply the Calico manifest to your cluster:

   kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aws/amazon-vpc-cni-k8s/master/config/master/calico-operator.yaml
   kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aws/amazon-vpc-cni-k8s/master/config/master/calico-crs.yaml
   

2. Watch the calico-system DaemonSets:

   kubectl get daemonset calico-node --namespace calico-system
   

   Wait for the calico-node DaemonSet to have the number of pods desired in the ready state; this indicates that Calico is working:

   NAME          DESIRED   CURRENT   READY     UP-TO-DATE   ...
   calico-node   3         3         3         3            ...
   

Cleanup | Delete EKS cluster

To delete the EKS cluster including any installation of Coder, substitute your cluster name and zone in the following eksctl command. This will take several minutes and can be monitored in the CloudFormation stack.

eksctl delete cluster --region=us-east-1 --name=trial-cluster

Next steps

If you have already installed Coder, you can add this cluster as a workspace provider.

To access Coder through a secure domain, review our guides on configuring and using TLS certificates.

Once complete, see our page on Coder installation.