eks-distro VS kind

EKS Distro is an open source project on GitHub. You can check out the repository at this link. https://github.com/aws/eks-distro/

I work on EKS Anywhere and familiar with those options but my answer will be biased

EKS Anywhere provides a CLI, packaged Cluster API, and other tools (CNI, GitOps) on top of raw Kubernetes. K8s, k3s, k0s are binaries you have to manage and are similar to EKS Distro [1] which we publish and build on top of.

EKS Anywhere is designed to give you clusters you can manage long term using Cluster API and a full suite of tools for how we thing Kubernetes clusters should be run based on our experience running EKS. It is a closer comparison to Rancher's RKE or VMware Tanzu for provisioning clusters, but some features and implementation details are different.

1: https://distro.eks.amazonaws.com/

EKS Anywhere builds on the strengths of Amazon EKS Distro, the same open-source distribution of Kubernetes that is used by Amazon EKS on the cloud, thus fostering consistency and compatibility between clusters both on AWS as well as on-premises.

yes im aware of bmctl. however you dont have control over the kubernetes distro that's running.

is there anything similar to https://github.com/aws/eks-distro ?

EKS-A focuses on cluster management for HA environments. By default we use 3 etcd nodes, 2 control plane nodes, and 3 worker nodes. It uses cilium as the default CNI and Cluster API controllers for continual cluster state management. It has some optional configuration for a flux controller and OIDC authentication but it doesn't add default services or workloads. EKS-A also uses EKS Distro which is the open source Kubernetes distribution we run in hosted EKS.

Well almost... announcement and GitHub issue

EKS Anywhere is not released. It is “coming soon” and is based on EKS Distro. Distro is OSS. Anywhere will be supported at GA release.

To get started, you'll need to install clusteradm and kubectl and start up three Kubernetes clusters. To simplify cluster administration, this article starts up three kind clusters with the following names and purposes:

Kind: is a tool for running local Kubernetes clusters using Docker container "nodes." It was primarily designed for testing Kubernetes itself but can also be used for local development or continuous integration.

Fortunately, just as projects like kind and Minikube enable developers to spin up a local Kubernetes environment in no time, CRC, also known as OpenShift Local and a recursive acronym for "CRC - Runs Containers", offers developers a local OpenShift environment by means of a pre-configured VM similar to how Minikube works under the hood.

I recently purchased a used Lenovo M900 Think Centre (i7 with 32GB RAM) from eBay to expand my mini-homelab, which was just a single Synology DS218+ plugged into my ISP's router (yuck!). Since I've been spending a big chunk of time at work playing around with Kubernetes, I figured that I'd put my skills to the test and run a k3s node on the new server. While I was familiar with k3s before starting this project, I'd never actually run it before, opting for tools like kind (and minikube before that) to run small test clusters for my local development work.

Features compared to https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/

Kind allows you to run a Kubernetes cluster inside Docker. This is incredibly useful for developing Helm charts, Operators, or even just testing out different k8s features in a safe way.

Check out KinD

If you're just messing around, just use kind (https://kind.sigs.k8s.io) or minikube if you want VMs (https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io). Both work on ARM-based platforms.

You can also use k3s; it's hella easy to get started with and it works great.

We'll install APIClarity into a Kubernetes cluster to test our API documentation. We're using a Kind cluster for demonstration purposes. Of course, if you have another Kubernetes cluster up and running elsewhere, all steps also work there.

yes I know there is lens, but it does not allow me to see logs of multiple pods at same time and what is even more important it is not friendly for ephemeral clusters - in my case with help of kind I am recreating whole cluster each time from scratch