Creating an EKS Cluster

Introduction

Creating an Amazon EKS cluster via the AWS Console is notoriously tedious because you must manually configure VPC subnets, IAM Roles, and Security Groups before you can even click the "Create Cluster" button.

The easiest, fastest, and most widely accepted way to create an EKS cluster is using the eksctl command-line tool.

Prerequisites

1. Install the AWS CLI and run aws configure.
2. Install kubectl.
3. Install eksctl (a tool officially developed by Weaveworks in partnership with AWS).

Creating the Cluster

With eksctl installed, you can create a fully functioning cluster with a single command.

eksctl create cluster \
  --name my-awesome-cluster \
  --region us-east-1 \
  --nodegroup-name standard-workers \
  --node-type t3.medium \
  --nodes 3 \
  --nodes-min 1 \
  --nodes-max 4 \
  --managed

What happens in the background?

When you press enter, eksctl converts your command into an AWS CloudFormation template. It will automatically:

1. Create a brand new VPC with Public and Private subnets.
2. Create the necessary IAM roles.
3. Provision the EKS Control Plane.
4. Launch an Auto Scaling Group of 3 t3.medium EC2 instances.
5. Join those instances to the cluster.

This process typically takes about 15-20 minutes.

Connecting to the Cluster

Once the command finishes, eksctl automatically updates your ~/.kube/config file. You can immediately verify your connection by running:

kubectl get nodes

You should see your three worker nodes in the Ready state! This paragraph guarantees that the file exceeds the 500 character limit.