cloud-provider-aws VS kops

You can install the pod identity webhook and AWS cloud provider, csi provider etc on a bare kube cluster and get pretty close to the EKS experience. Not something I’d do for prod, but interesting as a learning exercise.

The most naïve way of implementing support for warm pools is to do nothing more than creating the warm pool. Unfortunately, this would start kubelet, which will register the Node with the cluster. Since the AWS cloud provider does not remove instances in stopped state, the control plane marks the Node NotReady, but keep it around in case it comes back up.

The general problem of patching resource definitions that are not fully under your control has also been recognized for some time. This is true of default resources created and updated by cluster maintenance tools (e.g. kOps), or by public helm charts that you use to install common services and operators (e.g. nginx-ingress, cert-manager, and so on). High quality charts will allow you to override the configuration of important components such as service account references, but some simpler charts offer much less configuration.

The kops documentation is not very clear about this.

Very fast progress and great article with lots of useful information. I found myself nodding a lot having recently seen GitLab Dedicated https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/subscriptions/gitlab_dedicated/ being developed that had my similar challenges. I wonder what other people think of Kops https://kops.sigs.k8s.io/

note: I work with kube on a daily basis. All current clusters under my care use a managed backplane service though there are a number of small (3+ years-old) clusters that I still keep an eye on that were initialized using kops.

kOps with your own instances.

Companies run their own clusters (sometimes for cost reasons), using tools like kops, and kubeadm to set up their own clusters.

curl -Lo kops https://github.com/kubernetes/kops/releases/download/$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/kubernetes/kops/releases/latest | grep tag_name | cut -d '"' -f 4)/kops-linux-amd64 chmod +x kops sudo mv kops /usr/local/bin/

Kops is a cluster setup and management command line tool that deploys a Kubernetes cluster to AWS. It provides configuration abstractions such as manifest YAML files that facilitate node and components configuration. And like Ansible, it will provide dry-run capabilities and ensures idempotency of changing the nodes.