Part 1: Provision

What Will You Do¶

In this part of the self-paced exercise, you will provision an Amazon EKS cluster based on a declarative cluster specification which contains two (2) managed nodes groups. The first managed node group will be comprised of on-demand compute instances and run the system level resources while the second managed node group will be comprised of spot instances and run application workloads. The cluster will use the minimal blueprint.

Step 1: Provision Cluster¶

In this step, we will create the declarative cluster specificiation file and use the RCTL CLI to provision the cluster from the specification file.

Save the below specification file to your computer as "eks-spot-cluster.yaml". Note, the highlighted sections in the spec will need to be updated to match your environment.

apiVersion: infra.k8smgmt.io/v3
kind: Cluster
metadata:
  name: eks-spot-cluster
  project: defaultproject
spec:
  blueprintConfig:
    name: minimal
    version: latest
  cloudCredentials: aws-cloud-credential
  config:
    managedNodeGroups:
    - amiFamily: AmazonLinux2
      desiredCapacity: 2
      iam:
        withAddonPolicies:
          autoScaler: true
      instanceTypes:
      - t3.large
      - t2.large
      maxSize: 4
      minSize: 2
      name: managed-spot
      spot: true
    - amiFamily: AmazonLinux2
      desiredCapacity: 1
      iam:
        withAddonPolicies:
          autoScaler: true
      instanceType: t3.large
      labels:
        nodes: system
      maxSize: 2
      minSize: 1
      name: managed-system
      taints:
      - effect: NoSchedule
        key: components
        value: system
    metadata:
      name: eks-spot-cluster
      region: us-west-2
      version: "1.23"
    network:
      cni:
        name: aws-cni
    vpc:
      autoAllocateIPv6: false
      clusterEndpoints:
        privateAccess: true
        publicAccess: false
      cidr: 192.168.0.0/16
  systemComponentsPlacement:
    nodeSelector:
      nodes: system
    tolerations:
    - effect: NoSchedule
      key: components
      operator: Equal
      value: system
  type: aws-eks

Update the following sections of the specification file with details to match your environment

Update the name section with the name of the cluster to be created and the project section with the name of the Rafay project you previously created
```
  name: eks-spot-cluster
  project: defaultproject
```
Update the cloudCredentials section with the name of the AWS cloud credential that was previously created
```
  cloudCredentials: aws-cloud-credential
```
Update the name andregion sections with the cluster name and the AWS region where the cluster will be located
```
    metadata:
      name: eks-spot-cluster
      region: us-west-2
```
Save the updates that were made to the file
Open Terminal (on macOS/Linux) or Command Prompt (Windows) and navigate to the folder where you saved the file
Execute the following command to provision the cluster from the specification file previously saved
```
./rctl apply -f eks-spot-cluster.yaml
```
Login to the web console
Navigate to your project
Select Infrastructure -> Clusters

Provisioning in Process

Click on the cluster name to monitor progress

Provisioning in Process

Provisioning the infrastructure will take approximately 45 minutes to complete. The final step in the process is the blueprint sync.

Step 2: Verify Cluster¶

Once provisioning is complete, you should see the cluster in the web console

Provisioned Cluster

Click on the kubectl link and type the following command

kubectl get nodes

You should see something like the following

NAME                                           STATUS   ROLES    AGE     VERSION
ip-192-168-34-232.us-west-2.compute.internal   Ready    <none>   8m46s   v1.23.13-eks-fb459a0
ip-192-168-4-152.us-west-2.compute.internal    Ready    <none>   8m10s   v1.23.13-eks-fb459a0
ip-192-168-69-188.us-west-2.compute.internal   Ready    <none>   8m9s    v1.23.13-eks-fb459a0

Now, we will verify that the one node group is using spot instances.

Select Infrastructure -> Clusters
Click on the cluster name
Click on the "Node Group" tab

You will see the "managed-spot" node group shows the use of spot instances and the spot instance types that can be used.

Spot Node Group

Next, we will verify the nodes in the node group are labeled to use spot instances.

Click on the "Nodes" tab
Click on "Overview" on one of the nodes in the "managed-spot" node group

You will see the capacity type is set to "SPOT"

Spot Nodes

Now we will verify the system resources are running on the on-demand node group.

Click "Nodes" in the tree at the top of the page to return to the nodes tab
Locate the "Node ID" of the node in the "managed-system" node group

Node ID

Click on the "Resources" tab
Click on "Pods" in the left side window
Select "rafay-system" from the namespace drop down menu
Click the gear icon on the right side of the page and select "Node"

You will see that all of the system components are running on the "managed-system" node that was previously identified.

System Components

Recap¶

Congratulations! At this point, you have successfully provisioned an Amazon EKS cluster with a managed spot instance node group in your AWS account using the RCTL CLI.