Running Containers on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)

Course Duration

3 days

Audience

Employees of federal, state and local governments; and businesses working with the government.

Prerequisites

Linux administration experience. Basic network administration experience. Basic knowledge of containers and Kubernetes. Ideally, completed an AWS Associate-level certification or have equivalent experience.

Course Description

Amazon EKS makes it easy for you to run Kubernetes on AWS without needing to install, operate, and maintain your own Kubernetes control plane. In this course, you will learn container management and orchestration for Kubernetes using Amazon EKS. You will build an Amazon EKS cluster, configure the environment, deploy the cluster, and then add applications to your cluster. You will manage container images using Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) and learn how to automate application deployment. You will deploy applications using CI/CD tools. You will learn how to monitor and scale your environment by using metrics, logging, tracing, and horizontal/vertical scaling. You will learn how to design and manage a large container environment by designing for efficiency, cost, and resiliency. You will configure AWS networking services to support the cluster and learn how to secure your Amazon EKS environment.

Learning Objectives

• Review and examine containers, Kubernetes and Amazon EKS fundamentals and the impact of containers on workflows.
• Build an Amazon EKS cluster by selecting the correct compute resources to support worker nodes.
• Secure your environment with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) authentication by creating an Amazon EKS service role for your cluster
• Deploy an application on the cluster. Publish container images to ECR and secure access via IAM policy.
• Automate and deploy applications, examine automation tools and pipelines. Create a GitOps pipeline using WeaveFlux.
• Collect monitoring data through metrics, logs, tracing with AWS X-Ray and identify metrics for performance tuning. Review scenarios where bottlenecks require the best scaling approach using horizontal or vertical scaling.
• Assessthe tradeoffs between efficiency, resiliency, and cost and impact for tuning one over the other. Describe and outline a holistic, iterative approach to optimizing your environment. Design for cost, efficiency, and resiliency.
• Configure the AWS networking services to support the cluster. Describe how EKS/Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) functions and simplifies inter-node communications. Describe the function of VPC Container Network Interface (CNI). Review the benefits of a service mesh.
• Upgrade your Kubernetes, Amazon EKS, and third party tools.

Course Outline

Course Topics

• Course preparation activities and agenda
• Design principles for building applications
• What are containers?
• Components of a container
• Writing Dockerfiles
• Challenges of managing many containers
• What is Kubernetes and why is it important?
• Components of the Kubernetes control plane
• Kubernetes worker nodes and pods
• Key Kubernetes objects
• Managing Kubernetes with kubectl
• Hands-On Lab 1: Deploying Kubernetes Pods
• How Amazon EKS manages the Kubernetes control plane
• Fundamentals of Amazon EKS security
• Use cases for extending Amazon EKS to the data plane
• Running worker nodes on managed node groups
• Running containers on AWS Fargate with Amazon EKS
• Amazon EKS tasks versus Kubernetes tasks
• Visual review of the Amazon EKS architecture to be built in labs
• IAM authentication
• Amazon VPC and AWS networking fundamentals
• Different methods to create a cluster
• High-level steps in cluster creation
• Function of eksctl
• Preparing for labs: Review the lab activities for the course
• Hands-On Lab 02: Building an Amazon EKS cluster
• Publishing container images to Amazon ECR
• Deploying applications with Helm
• Continuous deployment in Amazon EKS
• GitOps and Amazon EKS
• Hands-On Lab 03: Deploying applications
• Configuring observability in an Amazon EKS cluster
• Collecting metrics
• Using metrics to automatically scale EC2 Auto Scaling groups
• Managing logs
• Application tracing in Amazon EKS
• Gaining and applying insight from observability
• Hands-On Lab 04: Monitoring Amazon EKS
• Optimizing your Amazon EKS application architecture
• Relationship between cost, efficiency, and resilience
• Anatomy of an Amazon EKS cluster from a cost perspective
• Using tagging with pod placement for cost accountability
• Sizing containers and worker nodes efficiently
• Review: VPC fundamentals
• The importance of major communication components
• Communication flow in a noncontainerized architecture
• Challenges of network communication in Kubernetes
• Comparing the Docker communication solution with the Kubernetes model
• How Amazon EKS and Amazon VPC simplify inter-node communications
• Managing pod communication in Amazon EKS
• The relationship between communications and scalability
• Running worker nodes in a subnet not associated with the cluster
• Managing service name resolution
• Using a service mesh with Amazon EKS
• Configuring AWS App Mesh
• Hands-On Lab 05: Exploring Amazon EKS Communication
• How IAM integrates with Kubernetes Role Based Access Control (RBAC)
• Managing cluster endpoint access control
• Auditing access with AWS CloudTrail logs
• Mitigating security risks during the build of a container image
• Securing network communications
• Managing secrets
• Hands-On Lab 06: Securing Amazon EKS
• Contrasting Kubernetes version updates and Amazon EKS platform version updates
• Upgrading your Kubernetes version
• Upgrading your Amazon EKS version
• Maintaining your third-party applications

Frequently Asked Questions