Table of Content

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What this is:

This is the start of a series of blogs that will walk through how to create an AWS EKS ecosystem that is suitable for production usage. This process and the set of code here has been used in multiple production environment over the years at various companies. <—Link to companies in the kubernetes-ops page

The stack that this Creates

<——————————————————————————-add the kubernetes stack diagram here

Why another AWS EKS How To?

Most tutorials or How Tos out there is not suitable for production use and in fact most of the stuff out there tells you that outright saying something like this is an example and do not use for production or if you want to use this for production, do x,y,z as well and they don’t walk you through the x,y,z. <–there are a bunch of gcp docs that says this, find some

Everything outlined here is currently being used in a production environment in many companies right now.

The problem is that if you wanted to do one thing you can mostly just Google it and find a bunch of tutorials on how to do that one thing. Even how to create something with a bunch of components. However, this creates a full Kubernetes stack which are a lot of components.

Back to what is out there. Most of everything out there deal with “Day 1/0” activities where it helps you to create it and it doesn’t deal with the “Day 2” or on going maintenance, updates, and change cycle of the infrastructure. Arguably, the Day 2 activities is where you spend most of your time and the lifecycle of the infrastructure. Then why doesn’t most of the tutorials out there talk more about this instead of just the creation phase? Because that phase of the lifecycle is hard, it very much depends on your setup, and it is not as sexy as hey, I can create this complex setup with one command.

This series of blogs will walk us through how we manage a real production infrastructure.

What this is not

This is for everyone and I think it is a good read even if you are not going to use it yet. It will give you some very good ideas on what is possible and why you want to do it this way.

If you just want to experiment with running your application on Kubernetes I would not suggest that you follow this set of guides. This set of guides was intended for people who have chosen Kubernetes and want to run it in production. If you just wanted to “try” out Kubernetes, just click through the AWS EKS console and bring yourself up a Kubernetes cluster and get to the running your application part to see if you like it.

Why you would want to use this

You want to use this because you want to run your application on Kubernetes and you are saying I want to go to production with it. I want an infrastructure process that has been tested and well worked out. I want a secure infrastructure and process. Using this set of items will accelerate your time to production because this setup has been through many many revisions and is battle tested. I’m definitely not saying it is perfect but a lot of the imperfections has been removed over time.

You want a GitOps Infrastructure as Code (IaC) workflow for creating and managing your infrastructure.

Why we are posting this

If you were like me, you would be asking why are they posting this? What is the motivation here? Free is never free =).

You would be right. We do have an ulterior motive for publishing this as all open source stuff.

We are consultants! We think that the items here are table stakes even though we have spent thousands of hours on it and living in it. The code by itself has never been the thing that gave us the income. It has always been the combination of the code and us helping people walk through this process that was the magic combination.

We publish the code and this series of blogs as content marketing. To get our names out there on what we can do. Some people will just use the code. Cool! But hopefully there will be those few that wants our expertise as well to even further accelerate their journey into a Cloud Native framework.

Learn more about integrating Kubernetes apps

ManagedKube Website

More troubleshooting blog posts

Contact me if you have any questions about this or want to chat, happy to start a dialog or help out: blogs@managedkube.com

Full | GitOps | AWS | EKS