1. Pulumi Templates
  2. Kubernetes Cluster Templates
  3. Kubernetes Cluster on AWS

Kubernetes Cluster on AWS

The Kubernetes Cluster template creates an infrastructure as code project in your favorite language and deploys a managed Kubernetes cluster to AWS. The architecture includes a VPC with public and private subnets and deploys an Amazon EKS cluster that provides a managed Kubernetes control plane. Kubernetes worker nodes are deployed on private subnets for improved security. Load balancers created by workloads deployed on the EKS cluster will be automatically created in the public subnets. The template generates a complete infrastructure as code program to give you a working project out of the box that you can customize easily and extend to suit your needs.

An architecture diagram of the Pulumi AWS Kubernetes template

Using this template

To use this template to deploy your own managed Kubernetes cluster, make sure you’ve installed Pulumi and configured your AWS credentials, then create a new project using the template in your language of choice:

$ mkdir my-k8s-cluster && cd my-k8s-cluster
$ pulumi new kubernetes-aws-typescript
Alternatively, you can create and configure a new project with this template (kubernetes-aws-typescript) in the Pulumi Service.
$ mkdir my-k8s-cluster && cd my-k8s-cluster
$ pulumi new kubernetes-aws-python
Alternatively, you can create and configure a new project with this template (kubernetes-aws-python) in the Pulumi Service.
$ mkdir my-k8s-cluster && cd my-k8s-cluster
$ pulumi new kubernetes-aws-go
Alternatively, you can create and configure a new project with this template (kubernetes-aws-go) in the Pulumi Service.
$ mkdir my-k8s-cluster && cd my-k8s-cluster
$ pulumi new kubernetes-aws-csharp
Alternatively, you can create and configure a new project with this template (kubernetes-aws-csharp) in the Pulumi Service.
$ mkdir my-k8s-cluster && cd my-k8s-cluster
$ pulumi new kubernetes-aws-yaml
Alternatively, you can create and configure a new project with this template (kubernetes-aws-yaml) in the Pulumi Service.

Follow the prompts to complete the new-project wizard. When it’s done, you’ll have a complete Pulumi project that’s ready to deploy and configured with the most common settings. Feel free to inspect the code in index.js index.ts __main__.py main.go Program.cs Program.fs Program.vb App.java Pulumi.yaml for a closer look.

Deploying the project

The template requires no additional configuration. Once the new project is created, you can deploy it immediately with pulumi up:

$ pulumi up

When the deployment completes, Pulumi exports the following stack output values:

kubeconfig
The cluster’s kubeconfig file which you can use with kubectl to access and communicate with your clusters.
vpcId
The ID for the VPC that your cluster is running in.

Output values like these are useful in many ways, most commonly as inputs for other stacks or related cloud resources.

Customizing the project

Projects created with the Kubernetes template expose the following configuration settings:

minClusterSize
The minimum number of nodes to allow in the cluster. Defaults to 3.
maxClusterSize
The maximum number of nodes to allow in the cluster. Defaults to 6.
desiredClusterSize
The desired number of nodes in the cluster. Defaults to 3.
eksNodeInstanceType
The EC2 instance type to use for the nodes. Defaults to t2.medium.
vpcNetworkCidr
The network CIDR to use for the VPC. Defaults to 10.0.0.0/16.

All of these settings are optional and may be adjusted either by editing the stack configuration file directly (by default, Pulumi.dev.yaml). or by changing their values with pulumi config set.

Tidying up

You can cleanly destroy the stack and all of its infrastructure with pulumi destroy:

$ pulumi destroy

Learn more

Congratulations! You’re now well on your way to managing a production-grade Kubernetes cluster on AWS with Pulumi infrastructure as code — and there’s lots more you can do from here: