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Installing EKS CLI Tools
Installing EKS CLI Tools
Difficulty
Intermediate
Duration
58m
Students
7562
Ratings
4.5/5
Description

The Introduction to AWS EKS course is designed to aid and equip those, with a basic understanding of web-based software development, to know how to quickly launch a new EKS Kubernetes cluster and deploy, manage and measure its attributes.

In this course, you will learn how to utilize a range of new skills from, understanding how EKS implements and deploys clusters into a VPC and leverages ELBs to expose Kubernetes services, to gaining the ability to use, control, manage and measure an EKS Kubernetes cluster deployed application.

This course is made up of 4 in-depth demonstrations that, at the end of the course, will enable you to deploy an end-to-end microservices web-based application into an EKS Kubernetes cluster.

Learning Objectives

  • Understand the basic principles involved with launching an EKS Kubernetes cluster.
  • Analyze how to set up the required EKS client-side tooling required to launch and administer an EKS Kubernetes cluster.
  • Learn how to use the eksctl tool to create, query, and delete an EKS Kubernetes cluster.
  • Follow basic kubectl commands to create, query, and delete Kubernetes Pods and Services.
  • Explain how EKS implements and deploys cluster into a VPC and leverages ELBs to expose Kubernetes services.
  • Learn how to author and structure K8s definition files using YAML.
  • Gain experience in how to deploy an end-to-end microservices-based web application into an EKS Kubernetes cluster.
  • Be able to use, control, manage and measure an EKS Kubernetes cluster deployed application.

Prerequisites

  • High-level understanding of web-based software development.
  • Knowledge of Docker and Containers.
  • Prior experience in microservice architectures.

Intended Audience

  • Software Developers.
  • Container and Microservices Administrators and Developers.
  • Cloud System Administrators and/or Operations.

Source Code: Store2018 Microservices

 

Source Code: Store2018 EKS Kubernetes Deployment Files

 

AWS Credential Management 

The terminal based demonstrations provided within this course use the AWS_PROFILE environment variable to specify a named profile for AWS authentication. For more information regarding how this is setup and managed read the following documentation:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-configure-profiles.html

 

Related Training Content

Transcript

Okay, welcome back. In this demonstration, we're going to set up our tool line to allow us to communicate and create our EKS clusters. So there are three tools that we're going to install. The first is kubectl. The second is the AWS IAM authenticator, and the third one is a helper utility called eksctl. So let's now discuss each of these three tools. So those unfamiliar with kubectl, kubectl is a command line interface, for running commands against Kubernetes clusters. The AWS IAM authenticator is a tool that allows you to use AWS IAM credentials to authenticate against Kubernetes clusters. And eksctl provides a nice abstraction for creating clusters. It's a command line interface tool, and provides a very simple method for bringing clusters up. 

As we'll see later on, all you need to do to bring up a EKS cluster is run eksctl create cluster, and underneath it will take care of all of the wiring up of the various, individual components. Okay, let's begin the installation. So the first thing we'll do, is we'll navigate to the getting started with Amazon EKS guide that AWS provides. Navigating down, we'll jump to the instructions for installing kubectl. As you can see, Amazon has provided operating system specific binaries for kubectl. Since I'm running on a Mac, I can use the MacOS version, or simply I can copy this command here. We'll jump into the terminal. I'll quickly do a directory listing. That's empty. I'll paste the command that I just copied, and this will download the version specific for MacOS. Okay, that's finished. We'll do a directory listing again, and you can see that we've downloaded the binary. Next, we'll add execute permissions to it. So, we do so by running chmod + x, and then the binary. 

Do a directory listing again, and you can see now that it's got the execute permissions. From here, we want to move or copy the binary kubectl into our /usr/local/bin/ directory. And to ensure that we run this particular version of kubectl, we need to update our path variable. So we'll prepend the directory that we just copied it into, to the path environment variable, and then, we can simply run the command, we'll query the version of it. We only want the client version portion. And here we see we've got version 1.10.3. Now, it's very important that you run with the 1.10 or greater version of kubectl, as this particular version is designed to integrate with the AWS IAM authenticator, which we'll install next. So that's a good start. Okay, we'll jump back to the AWS documentation. And the next thing we'll do is install the AWS IAM authenticator. Again, AWS provides operating system versions for this particular binary, and again, because we're running on MacOS, I'll just copy this command here. I'll jump back into my terminal, paste the command, and this will download the AWS IAM authenticator locally. I'll do a directory listing. We can see we've downloaded the AWS IAM authenticator.

 I'll add execute permissions to it. Again, that's now executable. We'll again copy it into /usr/local/bin/. Because we updated the path environment variable previously, we know that this will run when we request for it. So now we can test it by running AWS IAM authenticator, with the help parameter. And here you can see that this particular binary has run successfully. And, finally, to install the eksctl utility, we can do a brew install weaveworks/tap/eksctl So here you can see that I'm being informed that I've already got this installed as expected, but I can upgrade it, by running brew upgrade eksctl, which I'll do. Okay, so that's completed successfully, so we can now test it out. Eksctl and we can run it with the parameter help. And again, you can see that that's completed, so the binary has been successfully installed.

 Okay, the next prerequisite that we need to ensure has been installed is the AWS CLI. So we can simply run aws iam get user, to see whether we have the AWS CLI set up. So it's installed on this machined, but I haven't yet configured the credentials that it operates under, so I'll do that in the background. So here, I'll run, export AWS_PROFILE with the profile that I've got configured, and if I rerun that command, I can see now that I'm authenticated against my AWS account. So everything is configured locally. I can now go back to the eksctl command, run help again. I can see that there's a get to check for particular resources. So one final thing we'll do in this demonstration is to run eksctl get clusters, and this should return back empty, because I don't have any EKS clusters set up. Okay, so that succeeded, and as expected has come back with no clusters found. Okay, that completes this demonstration, in which we set up our three utilities that we're going to use to set up our EKS clusters. Go ahead and close this demonstration, and we'll see you shortly in the next one.

About the Author
Students
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Jeremy is a Content Lead Architect and DevOps SME here at Cloud Academy where he specializes in developing DevOps technical training documentation.

He has a strong background in software engineering, and has been coding with various languages, frameworks, and systems for the past 25+ years. In recent times, Jeremy has been focused on DevOps, Cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), Security, Kubernetes, and Machine Learning.

Jeremy holds professional certifications for AWS, Azure, GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes (CKA, CKAD, CKS).