eksctl VS conduit

There are a variety of ways in which you can create an Amazon EKS cluster. I prefer using eksctl CLI because of the convenience it offers. Creating an an EKS cluster using eksctl, can be as easy as this:

There are many ways to create a cluster such as using eksctl. In my case, I will use terraform module cause it’s easy to reuse and comprehend.

eksctl [eksctl] is the tool that can provision EKS cluster as well as supporting VPC network infrastructure.

For this and many other reasons I recommend doing everything in Terraform EXCEPT EKS and its node groups. For that, I use https://eksctl.io/ because it much better manages the lifecycle of EKS and your node groups. I have an blog article better explaining why I recommend it, and another blog article explaining how to do zero-downtime upgrades with EKSCTL.

eksctl

Second, make sure you create a spot instance group that attempts to launch MULTIPLE different instance types. This way if one instance type gets flushed, your autoscaler will kick in and launch a different type. Without this, you WILL HAVE DOWNTIME if a sudden price hike and flush occurs. If you're using eksctl I have example configurations that use multi-instance types on Github here.

There are a variety of ways in which you can create an Amazon EKS cluster. I prefer using eksctl CLI because of the convenience it offers. Creating an an EKS cluster using eksctl, can be as easy as this:

I've written an article on this, with my recommended tool for managing eks EKSCTL.

--- AWSTemplateFormatVersion: '2010-09-09' Parameters: VpcId: Type: AWS::EC2::VPC::Id Description: ID of the VPC in which to create the Kubernetes cluster SubnetIds: Type: List Description: List of Subnet IDs in which to create the Kubernetes cluster KeyPairName: Type: AWS::EC2::KeyPair::KeyName Description: Name of the EC2 Key Pair to use for SSH access to worker nodes ClusterName: Type: String Description: Name of the Kubernetes cluster to create Resources: ControlPlaneSecurityGroup: Type: AWS::EC2::SecurityGroup Properties: VpcId: !Ref VpcId GroupDescription: Allow inbound traffic to the Kubernetes control plane SecurityGroupIngress: - IpProtocol: tcp FromPort: 22 ToPort: 22 CidrIp: 0.0.0.0/0 WorkerNodeSecurityGroup: Type: AWS::EC2::SecurityGroup Properties: VpcId: !Ref VpcId GroupDescription: Allow inbound traffic to Kubernetes worker nodes SecurityGroupIngress: - IpProtocol: tcp FromPort: 22 ToPort: 22 CidrIp: 0.0.0.0/0 ControlPlaneInstanceProfile: Type: AWS::IAM::InstanceProfile Properties: Roles: - !Ref ControlPlaneRole ControlPlaneRole: Type: AWS::IAM::Role Properties: AssumeRolePolicyDocument: Version: '2012-10-17' Statement: - Effect: Allow Principal: Service: - ec2.amazonaws.com Action: - sts:AssumeRole ManagedPolicyArns: - arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonEKSClusterPolicy - arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonEKSServicePolicy ControlPlaneInstance: Type: AWS::EC2::Instance Properties: ImageId: ami-0b69ea66ff7391e80 InstanceType: t2.micro KeyName: !Ref KeyPairName NetworkInterfaces: - DeviceIndex: 0 AssociatePublicIpAddress: true GroupSet: - !Ref ControlPlaneSecurityGroup SubnetId: !Select [0, !Ref SubnetIds] IamInstanceProfile: !Ref ControlPlaneInstanceProfile UserData: Fn::Base64: !Sub | #!/bin/bash echo 'net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables=1' | tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf sysctl -p yum update -y amazon-linux-extras install docker -y service docker start usermod -a -G docker ec2-user curl -o /usr/local/bin/kubectl https://amazon-eks.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/1.21.2/2021-07-05/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl chmod +x /usr/local/bin/kubectl echo 'export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin' >> /etc/bashrc curl --silent --location "https://github.com/weaveworks/eksctl/releases

Leverage a service mesh like Istio or Linkerd to manage communication between microservices within the Kubernetes cluster. These service meshes can be configured to intercept JMX traffic and enforce access control policies. Benefits:

Looks like CNCF waved them through Graduation anyway, let's look at policies from July 28, 2021 when they were deemed "Graduated"

All maintainers of the LinkerD project had @boyant.io email addresses. [0] They do list 4 other members of a "Steering Committee", but LinkerD's GOVERNANCE.md gives all of the power to maintainers: [1]

> Ideally, all project decisions are resolved by maintainer consensus. If this is not possible, maintainers may call a vote. The voting process is a simple majority in which each maintainer receives one vote.

And CNCF Graduation policy says a project must "Have committers from at least two organizations" [2]. So it appears that the CNCF accepted the "Steering Committee" as an acceptable 2nd committer, even though the Governance policy still gave the maintainers all of the power.

I would like to know if the Steering Committee voted to remove stable releases from an un-biased position acting in the best interest of the project, or if they were simply ignored or not even advised on the decision.

I'm all for Boyant doing what they need to do to make money and survive as a Company. But at that point my opinion is that they should withdraw the project from the CNCF and stop pretending like the foundation has any influence on the project's governance.

[0] https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2/blob/489ca1e3189b6a5289d...

From here, we can explore other developments and tutorials on Kubernetes, such as o11y or observability (PLG, ELK, ELF, TICK, Jaeger, Pyroscope), service mesh (Linkerd, Istio, NSM, Consul Connect, Cillium), and progressive delivery (ArgoCD, FluxCD, Spinnaker).

https://linkerd.io/ is a much lighter-weight alternative but you do still get some of the fancy things like mtls without needing any manual configuration. Install it, label your namespaces, and let it do it's thing!

Would it be possible to create a custom extension with the code that authorize traffic based on my custom access token?

Open source API Gateway (Apache APISIX and Traefik), Service Mesh (Istio and Linkerd) solutions are capable of doing traffic splitting and implementing functionalities like Canary Release and Blue-Green deployment. With canary testing, you can make a critical examination of a new release of an API by selecting only a small portion of your user base. We will cover the canary release next section.

I have experimented with other service meshes and I was able to get up to speed quickly: Linkerd = 1 day, Istio = 3 days, NGINX Service Mesh = 5 days, but Consul Connect service mesh took at least 11 days to get off the ground. This is by far the most complex solution available.

https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2 (random example)

Out of the number of service mesh solutions that exist, the most popular open source ones are: Linkerd, Istio, and Consul. Here at Koyeb, we are using Kuma.