Julia Furst Morgado Managing EKS Clusters at Scale using Blueprints and Infrastructure as Code

AWS Community Day Midwest 2024
Julia Furst Morgado
Managing EKS Clusters at Scale using Blueprints and Infrastructure as Code

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Managing EKS Clusters at Scale
Using Blueprints and IaC
Julia Furst Morgado (she/her)
Global Technologist
Veeam Software
@juliafmorgado

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I have chosen Kubernetes, now what?

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Declarative and self-reconciling
Flexible and extensible
Why modernize with Kubernetes?
Ease
Same API regardless of where you
run or at what scale
Hundreds of solutions across the
CNCF ecosystem
De facto standard with numerous
enterprises helping chart the future
Consistency
Ecosystem
Community

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Amazon EKS in the cloud
•Single tenant
•Highly available API
endpoint
•99.95% SLA
•24x7x365 support
•Instance scaled up/down
seamlessly
•Upgrade and patching

•Focus on apps

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Challenges
Cluster Management
How can best practices be
implemented and enforced in an
EKS cluster?
Add-on Management
How do I install add-ons and their
dependencies?
Team Management
How do I configure an EKS cluster
(or multiple EKS clusters) to run
multiple workloads for multiple
teams?
Workload Management
How can I provision workloads?

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Kubernetes journey

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Amazon EKS Runtimes Overview

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Amazon EKS Runtimes Overview

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Amazon EKS Runtimes Overview

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We decided on this

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Kubernetes journey

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CNCF Landscape

"While the Kubernetes ecosystem boasts an
abundance of remarkable tools, there lacks a
comprehensive guide on integrating these
tools effectively."

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We arrived at this solution

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Kubernetes journey

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Day 2 challenges of modern applications
Observability
Operators need insights
into application
performance
Reliability
Workloads must be
scalable and reliable
Security
All applications need
automated security and
governance built in
Cost Efficiency
Speed and control
should not be mutually
exclusive with cost
efficiency

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Platform is
centrally
managed
App 3App 2App 1 App 4
APPS
EKS
SHARED SERVICES PLATFORM
COMPUTE
Fargate Bottlerocket
Components of
a modern
application

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Separation of concerns in software delivery
17
Application builders. Free to focus on building
applications that deliver business value to
customers.
Platform builders. Build and integrate tools
that provision, manage and secure the cloud
computing infrastructure.
Platform Engineers Software Engineers

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Software Engineers
Dev teams need the following
-Agility to quickly iterate and
test solutions
-Setting proper policies for
app-to-app communications
-Proper guardrails for
developers
-Consistency and
standardization of resources

Developers run into these problems
-Non-intuitive processes
-i.e. PR approval process using UI
vs. development using git
-Interruptions from
Infrastructure teams
-Sandbox environment
provisioning
-Requests needing support tickets
-Lack of automations
18

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Multi-team considerations

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Multi-environments

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How to get there?

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Amazon EKS Blueprints
An open-source framework that allows you to configure and deploy
complete EKS clusters across accounts and regions
Infrastructure as Code with
CDK and Terraform
Based on AWS best practices
and recommendations
Integrated with popular K8s
tools and services
Fully extensible and
customizable

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Leverage your preferred tools
https://github.com/aws-ia/terraform-aws-eks-bl
ueprints
https://github.com/aws-quickstart/cdk-e
ks-blueprints
AWS Cloud Development Kit
(AWS CDK) Terraform

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EKS Blueprint solution: Cluster & Infrastructure
24
Compute
Amazon EKS Bottlerocket AWS Fargate

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EKS Blueprints: Add-ons
25
Add-ons
ArgoCD
Nginx
CoreDNS External DNS
Cluster Autoscaler
Grafana
Prometheus
Compute
Amazon EKS Bottlerocket AWS Fargate
Veeam Kasten

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Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes on AWS for
Kubernetes backup and DR
COHESIVE INTEGRATION
•Works with with AWS services
•Database integration
(e.g., Amazon RDS)
•Kubernetes distributions (e.g., Red Hat
OpenShift Service on AWS [ROSA])
•Full application capture
•Cloud and on-premises
(Amazon EKS Anywhere)
•Cross-Region, cluster, account
•Simplified installation
•Billing: pay-as-you-go, term, etc.
•Portable BYO license
Amazon EKS

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Install add-ons according to best practices
https://github.com/aws-ia/terraform-aws-eks-blueprints-addons

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EKS Blueprints: Teams
28
Teams
Team B Team C Team DTeam A Team E
Add-ons
ArgoCD
Nginx
CoreDNS External DNS
Cluster Autoscaler
Grafana
Prometheus
Compute
Amazon EKS Bottlerocket AWS Fargate
Kasten K10

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•Configure and deploy EKS clusters according to AWS best practices.
•Replicate clusters across AWS accounts and regions.
•Integrate with an existing VPC or leverage the solution to deploy a new one.
•Built in pipeline triggered by git hook upon commit to the repository
Cluster Management
•Out of the box integrations with popular AWS services and Kubernetes add-ons.
•Provisions AWS resources that are necessary to support add-on functionality.
Add-on Management
•Create distinct teams for both administrators and application owners.
•Manage secure namespaces access for application teams.
Team Management
•Leverage GitOps tooling to manage workloads that run across your clusters.
•Self-service updating of workloads deployments using Pull Request.
Application Delivery
What do you get with EKS Blueprints

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EKS Blueprints Patterns

•Complete examples with
add-ons
•EKS cluster with external DNS
•EKS Fargate cluster
•Fully private EKS cluster
•Gitops with ArgoCD
•Gitlab CI/CD
•EFS shared storage
•EMR on EKS
•Cert-manager examples
•And more

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Next steps
Begin planning for EKS Blueprints integration by determining
infrastructure requirements. 
Gather details about the cluster’s desired functionality, including:
•Workload requirements
•Observability
•Scalability
•High availability
•External resource dependencies

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Explore EKS Blueprint resources

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Open Source repositories

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Testing and validation

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EKS Blueprints best practices
•Ensure that there is a clear plan for the desired EKS cluster architecture
•Validate the selected EKS Blueprints in a development environment
•Check available configuration options for the selected Blueprints
•Use GitOps to deploy and bootstrap the EKS cluster
•Ensure that the default Blueprint settings follow your organization’s security
requirements
•Enable observability tools
•Be mindful of the limitations of EKS Blueprints based on thorough testing and
validation

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Thank you!
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Julia Furst Morgado
@juliafmorgado
linkedin.com/in/juliafmorgado