AWS EKS

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) runs Kubernetes without installing and operating your own control plane. EKS manages the control plane and integrates with AWS services.

Table of Contents

• Core Concepts
• Common Patterns
• CLI Reference
• Best Practices
• Troubleshooting
• References

Core Concepts

Control Plane

Managed by AWS. Runs Kubernetes API server, etcd, and controllers across multiple AZs.

Node Groups

Type	Description
Managed	AWS manages provisioning, updates
Self-managed	You manage EC2 instances
Fargate	Serverless, per-pod compute

IRSA (IAM Roles for Service Accounts)

Associates Kubernetes service accounts with IAM roles for fine-grained AWS permissions.

Add-ons

Operational software: CoreDNS, kube-proxy, VPC CNI, EBS CSI driver.

Common Patterns

Create a Cluster

AWS CLI:

# Create cluster role
aws iam create-role \
  --role-name eks-cluster-role \
  --assume-role-policy-document '{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [{
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": {"Service": "eks.amazonaws.com"},
      "Action": "sts:AssumeRole"
    }]
  }'

aws iam attach-role-policy \
  --role-name eks-cluster-role \
  --policy-arn arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonEKSClusterPolicy

# Create cluster
aws eks create-cluster \
  --name my-cluster \
  --role-arn arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/eks-cluster-role \
  --resources-vpc-config subnetIds=subnet-12345678,subnet-87654321,securityGroupIds=sg-12345678

# Wait for cluster
aws eks wait cluster-active --name my-cluster

# Update kubeconfig
aws eks update-kubeconfig --name my-cluster --region us-east-1

eksctl (Recommended):