EKS Anywhere., Environmental substrate & prerequisites

This article is a part of the multi-part story of EKS Anywhere. Access it here EKS Anywhere, extending the Hybrid cloud momentum | by Ambar Hassani | Apr, 2022 | Medium

Step-1 Collect basic information for the EKS Anywhere cluster deployment

EKS Anywhere can get very granular to the point of having the control plane (master nodes), worker nodes and etcd nodes placed in different networks, different configurations, etc. However, in this particular case we will simplify the specifications by keeping the control (master nodes), worker and etcd nodes of the cluster in the same network with default configurations.

To simplify what is essential to a successful implementation, here is a handy table that you can use to collect information.

Note: You will need at-least 10–15 static IP addresses for the exercises in this saga series.

Step-2 Capacity requirements

Since we will be running a classic production grade environment, ensure an approximate usable capacity of 60 vCPUs, 400GiB memory and 900GiB storage. This should exclude any other overheads required by the virtualization layer and techniques used for the infrastructure (e.g. HCI overheads, etc.). The breakup is provided in the below gist

Step-3 vSphere related requirements

vSphere user: Create a vSphere user with administrative privileges

vSphere folder/s:

• Create a folder named “Templates” if it already does not exist right under the Data center resource in vSphere. This folder will be used to host the ubuntu base template for EKS Anywhere administrative machine and the ubuntu OS template/s for the EKS Anywhere cluster nodes
• In addition to that create another folder named “test-eks-anywhere”. This will be used to host all the cluster virtual machines. While you can use any other name for this folder, it is best to keep it as “test-eks-anywhere” as the cluster YAMLs used in this saga series are configured with this particular name

Local networking: Ensure adequate network connectivity between vCenter/vSphere, DHCP/DNS, EKS-Anywhere subnet. In this series, we will let all IP communications flow between these entities without any restrictions. Else you might want to evaluate specific port requirements as listed in this URL Ports and protocols | EKS Anywhere (amazonaws.com)

Internet connectivity: For the sake of simplicity, we will assume that the target environment has unrestricted outbound access to internet. Note that Proxy access and local registry support for restricted environments is also supported.

Inbound firewall ports are a non-issue as all connectivity is originated from within the environment.

You can create also create a narrower permissions model as described below:

The administrative machine and the target workload environment will need network access to:

• public.ecr.aws
• anywhere-assets.eks.amazonaws.com (to download the EKS Anywhere binaries, manifests and OVAs)
• distro.eks.amazonaws.com (to download EKS Distro binaries and manifests)
• d2glxqk2uabbnd.cloudfront.net (for EKS Anywhere and EKS Distro ECR container images)
• github.com
• Access to the specific AWS regions (required only if you are planning for EKS console integration)

And with all that, you are all set to explore the EKS Anywhere stack!

cheers

Ambar@thecloudgarage

#iwork4dell