Kubernetes on AWS with Arun Gupta

Since Kubernetes came out, engineers have been deploying clusters to Amazon. In the early years of Kubernetes, deploying to AWS meant that you had to manage the availability of the cluster yourself. You needed to configure etcd and your master nodes in a way that avoided having a single point of failure.

Deploying Kubernetes on AWS became simpler with an open-source tool called kops (short for Kubernetes Operations). Kops automates the provisioning and high-availability deployment of Kubernetes.

In late 2017, AWS released a managed Kubernetes service called EKS. EKS allows developers to run Kubernetes without having to manage the availability and scaling of a cluster. The announcement of EKS was exciting because it means that all of the major cloud providers are officially supporting Kubernetes.

Arun Gupta is a principal open-source technologist at AWS, and he joins the show to explain what is involved in deploying and managing a Kubernetes cluster. Arun describes how to operate a Kubernetes cluster, including logging, monitoring, storage, and updates. If you are convinced that you want to use Kubernetes, but you aren’t sure yet how you want to deploy it, this will be useful information for you.

We also discussed how Amazon built EKS, and some of the architectural decisions they made. AWS has had a managed container service called ECS since 2014. The development of ECS was instructive for the AWS engineers who built EKS. Amazon wanted to make EKS able to integrate with both open source tools and the Amazon managed services.

Transcript

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