How to Deploy Kubernetes on AWS

The high availability (HA) of clusters in production environments should be taken seriously. Kubernetes and AWS EC2 instances are widely used in various production environments. However, running Kubernetes on AWS while ensuring HA can be complex for many users. In this article, we will demonstrate how KubeKey can help you easily deploy Kubernetes on AWS and ensure HA.

To meet the HA service requirements of Kubernetes in AWS, we need to ensure the HA of kube-apiserver. You can use either of the following methods to meet the target:

Use AWS ELB (recommended).
Use keepalived+haproxy to implement load balancing for kube-apiserver.

This article uses the AWS ELB service as an example.

Prerequisites for Deployment on AWS

You need to create a storage system based on NFS, GlusterFS, or Ceph. In consideration of data persistence, we do not recommend OpenEBS for production environments. This article uses OpenEBS to configure LocalPV as the default storage service only for testing.
All nodes can be accessed over SSH.
The time of all nodes must be synchronized.
Red Hat systems contain SELinux by default. If you use a Red Hat system, you need to disable SELinux or set SELinux to the permissive mode.

Hosts

This article uses three AWS EC2 instances running Ubuntu 18.04 Server 64-bit. Each EC2 instance has 2 CPU cores and 4 GB memory.

Host IP Address	Host Name	Role
192.168.1.10	master1	master, node, etcd
192.168.1.11	master2	master, node, etcd
192.168.1.12	master3	master, node, etcd

Note: The preceding configuration is used only for demonstration. In production environments, you are advised to assign different roles to the nodes and deploy etcd and worker nodes separately to improve stability.

Create a VPC

vpc

Create a Subnet

Use the following settings to create a subnet for the VPC.

subnet

Create an Internet Gateway

Create an internet gateway and attach it to the VPC.

internet-gateway

Configure the Route Table

Add the 0.0.0.0/0 route to the default route table of the VPC.

route-table

Create a Security Group

Add the following inbound rule to the default security group of the VPC.

security-group

Create Hosts

Go to the EC2 instance creation page and use the following settings to create three EC2 instances.

Select an image.
Select an instance type.
Select the VPC and subnet.
Select the security group.
After the EC2 instances are created, associate an elastic IP address to each instance, which will be used for remote access.

Create a Load Balancer

On the EC2 dashboard, select Load Balancing > Target Groups, create a target group, and register port 6443 of the EC2 instances.
Create a network load balancer and select the VPC and subnet for the load balancer.
Configure the listener to listen on port 6443 and connect to the target group.

Check the IP Address of the Load Balancer

On the left navigation pane, select Network & Security > Network Interfaces to obtain the public and private IP addresses of the automatically generated ELB network interface.

lb-network-interface

Change the SSH Passwords of the AWS EC2 Instances

sudo passwd ubuntu

Change the SSH settings.

# Locate PasswordAuthentication, and change PasswordAuthentication no to: PasswordAuthentication yes
sudo vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Restart the SSH service.

sudo systemctl restart sshd

Obtain the KubeKey Deployment Tool

Download KubeKey from the Github Release Page or run the following command:

curl -sfL https://get-kk.kubesphere.io | VERSION=v2.0.0 sh -

Use KubeKey to Deploy a Kubernetes Cluster

Create the config-HA.yaml deployment configuration file.

./kk create config -f config-HA.yaml

Configure Cluster Information

Configure cluster information in the configuration file. For more information, see Multi-node Installation and Kubernetes Cluster Configurations.

apiVersion: kubekey.kubesphere.io/v1alpha1
kind: Cluster
metadata:
  name: sample
spec:
  hosts:
  - {name: master1, address: 192.168.0.10, internalAddress: 192.168.0.10, user: ubuntu, password: password}
  - {name: master2, address: 192.168.0.11, internalAddress: 192.168.0.11, user: ubuntu, password: password}
  - {name: master3, address: 192.168.0.12, internalAddress: 192.168.0.12, user: ubuntu, password: password}
  roleGroups:
    etcd:
    - master1
    - master2
    - master3
    master:
    - master1
    - master2
    - master3
    worker:
    - master1
    - master2
    - master3
  controlPlaneEndpoint:
    domain: lb.kubesphere.local
    address: "192.168.0.151"
    port: 6443
  kubernetes:
    version: v1.19.8
    imageRepo: kubesphere
    clusterName: cluster.local
  network:
    plugin: calico
    kubePodsCIDR: 10.233.64.0/18
    kubeServiceCIDR: 10.233.0.0/18
  registry:
    registryMirrors: []
    insecureRegistries: []
  addons: []

Create a Kubernetes Cluster

Run the following command to install Kubernetes on AWS:

./kk create cluster -f config-HA.yaml

If a message is displayed indicating that conntrack is missing, run the sudo apt-get install conntrack command to install conntrack.

Check the Deployment Result

Run the following commands to check the deployment result:

Run the kubectl get node -o wide command. If Ready is displayed in the STATUS column for all cluster nodes, the cluster nodes are running properly.

ubuntu@master1:~$ kubectl get node -o wide
NAME      STATUS   ROLES           AGE     VERSION   INTERNAL-IP    EXTERNAL-IP   OS-IMAGE             KERNEL-VERSION   CONTAINER-RUNTIME
master1   Ready    master,worker   3m45s   v1.19.8   192.168.0.10   <none>        Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS   5.4.0-1045-aws   docker://20.10.7
master2   Ready    master,worker   95s     v1.19.8   192.168.0.11   <none>        Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS   5.4.0-1045-aws   docker://20.10.7
master3   Ready    master,worker   2m      v1.19.8   192.168.0.12   <none>        Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS   5.4.0-1045-aws   docker://20.10.7

Run the kubectl get po -A command. If Running is displayed in the STATUS column for all components in the kube-system namespace, all Kubernetes components are running properly.

ubuntu@master1:~$ kubectl get po -A
NAMESPACE     NAME                                      READY   STATUS              RESTARTS   AGE
kube-system   calico-kube-controllers-8f59968d4-gchrc   1/1     Running             0          104s
kube-system   calico-node-c65wl                         1/1     Running             0          105s
kube-system   calico-node-kt4qd                         1/1     Running             0          105s
kube-system   calico-node-njxsh                         1/1     Running             0          105s
kube-system   coredns-86cfc99d74-ldx9b                  1/1     Running             0          3m59s
kube-system   coredns-86cfc99d74-pg5lj                  1/1     Running             0          3m59s
kube-system   kube-apiserver-master1                    1/1     Running             0          4m19s
kube-system   kube-apiserver-master2                    1/1     Running             0          115s
kube-system   kube-apiserver-master3                    1/1     Running             0          2m33s
kube-system   kube-controller-manager-master1           1/1     Running             0          4m19s
kube-system   kube-controller-manager-master2           1/1     Running             0          115s
kube-system   kube-controller-manager-master3           1/1     Running             0          2m34s
kube-system   kube-proxy-klths                          1/1     Running             0          2m12s
kube-system   kube-proxy-nm79t                          1/1     Running             0          3m59s
kube-system   kube-proxy-nsvmh                          1/1     Running             0          2m37s
kube-system   kube-scheduler-master1                    1/1     Running             0          4m19s
kube-system   kube-scheduler-master2                    1/1     Running             0          115s
kube-system   kube-scheduler-master3                    1/1     Running             0          2m34s
kube-system   nodelocaldns-nblsl                        1/1     Running             0          2m12s
kube-system   nodelocaldns-q78k4                        1/1     Running             0          3m54s
kube-system   nodelocaldns-q9244                        1/1     Running             0          2m37s

Run the kubectl get ep command. If the IP addresses of all master nodes are displayed in the ENDPOINTS column, HA is functioning properly for the AWS-managed Kubernetes cluster.

ubuntu@master1:~$ kubectl get ep
NAME         ENDPOINTS                                               AGE
kubernetes   192.168.0.10:6443,192.168.0.11:6443,192.168.0.12:6443   5m10s