Creating and managing clusters

Creating a cluster

Create a simple cluster with the following command:

eksctl create cluster

That will create an EKS cluster in your default region (as specified by your AWS CLI configuration) with one nodegroup containing 2 m5.large nodes.

Note

In us-east-1 you are likely to get UnsupportedAvailabilityZoneException. If you do, copy the suggested zones and pass --zones flag, e.g. eksctl create cluster --region=us-east-1 --zones=us-east-1a,us-east-1b,us-east-1d. This may occur in other regions, but less likely. You shouldn't need to use --zone flag otherwise.

After the cluster has been created, the appropriate kubernetes configuration will be added to your kubeconfig file. This is, the file that you have configured in the environment variable KUBECONFIG or ~/.kube/config by default. The path to the kubeconfig file can be overridden using the --kubeconfig flag.

Other flags that can change how the kubeconfig file is written:

flag	type	use	default value
--kubeconfig	string	path to write kubeconfig (incompatible with –auto-kubeconfig)	$KUBECONFIG or ~/.kube/config
--set-kubeconfig-context	bool	if true then current-context will be set in kubeconfig; if a context is already set then it will be overwritten	true
--auto-kubeconfig	bool	save kubeconfig file by cluster name	true
--write-kubeconfig	bool	toggle writing of kubeconfig	true

Using Config Files

You can create a cluster using a config file instead of flags.

First, create cluster.yaml file:

apiVersion: eksctl.io/v1alpha5
kind: ClusterConfig

metadata:
  name: basic-cluster
  region: eu-north-1

nodeGroups:
  - name: ng-1
    instanceType: m5.large
    desiredCapacity: 10
    volumeSize: 80
    ssh:
      allow: true # will use ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub as the default ssh key
  - name: ng-2
    instanceType: m5.xlarge
    desiredCapacity: 2
    volumeSize: 100
    ssh:
      publicKeyPath: ~/.ssh/ec2_id_rsa.pub

Next, run this command:

eksctl create cluster -f cluster.yaml

This will create a cluster as described.

If you needed to use an existing VPC, you can use a config file like this:

apiVersion: eksctl.io/v1alpha5
kind: ClusterConfig

metadata:
  name: cluster-in-existing-vpc
  region: eu-north-1

vpc:
  subnets:
    private:
      eu-north-1a: { id: subnet-0ff156e0c4a6d300c }
      eu-north-1b: { id: subnet-0549cdab573695c03 }
      eu-north-1c: { id: subnet-0426fb4a607393184 }

nodeGroups:
  - name: ng-1-workers
    labels: { role: workers }
    instanceType: m5.xlarge
    desiredCapacity: 10
    privateNetworking: true
  - name: ng-2-builders
    labels: { role: builders }
    instanceType: m5.2xlarge
    desiredCapacity: 2
    privateNetworking: true
    iam:
      withAddonPolicies:
        imageBuilder: true

To delete this cluster, run:

eksctl delete cluster -f cluster.yaml

Note

Without the --wait flag, this will only issue a delete operation to the cluster's CloudFormation stack and won't wait for its deletion.

In some cases, AWS resources using the cluster or its VPC may cause cluster deletion to fail. To ensure any deletion errors are propagated in eksctl delete cluster, the --wait flag must be used. If your delete fails or you forget the wait flag, you may have to go to the CloudFormation GUI and delete the eks stacks from there.

See examples/ directory for more sample config files.