148422597X Kubernetes Management Design Patterns [Vohra 2017-01-29] {E559F6BB}

CHAPTER 2
Kubernetes on CoreOS on AWS
Kubernetes is usually used with a cloud platform, as the hardware infrastructure required for a multi-node
Kubernetes cluster is best provisioned in a cloud environment. In Chapter 1 we used the kube-up tool to spin
up a cluster without requiring any configuration.
Problem
The kube-up tool does not create a production-ready cluster. One of the limitations of kube-up is that it does
not support CoreOS. Docker has to be installed, even though the Docker installation is preconfigured.
Solution
Docker is installed out-of-the-box on CoreOS. The CoreOS tool kube-aws can be used to spin up a
production-ready Kubernetes cluster on CoreOS nodes on EC2 without much configuration. The kubeaws
tool makes use of AWS CloudFormation to create a cluster of EC2 instances running CoreOS. AWS
CloudFormation is a service to provision AWS resources such as EC2 instances, Auto Scaling Groups,
and Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, all using a template. Using a single cluster configuration file
to provision an AWS CloudFormation for a Kubernetes cluster is a management design pattern. The
same cluster template may be reused to provision other Kubernetes clusters. Figure 2-1 shows an AWS
CloudFormation that consists of a Kubernetes Master node and three Kubernetes worker nodes, along with
an Auto Scaling Group and a Launch Configuration.
© Deepak Vohra 2017
D. Vohra, Kubernetes Management Design Patterns, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4842-2598-1_2
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