AWS Workshops DIY — EKS Workshop — 1. Introduction and Scope Review
Chapter 1 — Breaking ground on the latest EKS Workshop, you’ll like it!
The AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Workshop holds many virtues! Combine this workshop with the Amazon EKS User Guide, and you’ve got yourself a pretty well-defined learning strategy to master the most advanced and dominating Kubernetes platform in the modern Cloud Computing era.
This particular AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Workshop holds many virtues! First of all, it’s the latest and greatest at the time of this writing. Its predecessor, the EKS Immersion Workshop, was the best until this workshop came along with its modular approach, accompanied by a well-done video series, holistic implementation with a good mix of infrastructure-as-code (IaC) backend written in Terraform and CloudFormation, an advanced coding style plus smart CLI commands, and overall documentation. Combine this workshop with the Amazon EKS User Guide, and you’ve got yourself a pretty well-defined learning strategy to master the most advanced and dominating Kubernetes platform in the modern Cloud Computing era.
You’re going to learn a lot through this workshop but be warned, it’d test the limits of your patience as there’s plenty to read and practice hands-on, comprehend the concepts and components of Kubernetes, EKS constructs and customizations, and clearly understand the objectives of each featured modules. On the positive side, it surely pays to invest your attention here as I haven’t come across another source with a better explanation of the theories, illustrations, and presence of context-sensitive cross-references elsewhere. In no other books, no other blogs, no other videos. A quick browse of a randomly picked page as shown below substantiates the claim easily.
NOTE — I did write two evolving series in the past, see links below, one covering the basics of Kubernetes and the other covering the predecessor of this workshop as mentioned above. Both, IMO, are good learning aids and references while working on this workshop series.
The following three sections provide a good overview of the workshop structure and organization including pointers to some pre-implementation learning materials.
Understanding the Workshop Anatomy
Starting with the workshop home page, https://www.eksworkshop.com/, you’ll notice that this site is already well organized in terms of presenting everything module-by-module and chapter-by-chapter. For that reason, I’ll spare all redundancy throughout this and future posts and instead point to the right place as needed for reading, watching, and looking at the illustrations.
On the top menu, there are 8 modules — Introduction, Fundamentals, Autoscaling, Observability, Security, Networking, Automation, AIML.
Each module is organized into easy-to-follow chapters listed in the left menu. The right panel contains reading materials interspersed with code blocks. You’re free to jump around the modules and work as per your learning desire. The workshop steps are clearly laid out including pointing out pre-requisite steps of each module and each chapter. If anything goes wrong, you’ll find instructions on how to do a reset and start over, a very thoughtful provision by the AWS Workshop team, kudos!
Reading and Video Lessons
Concepts are explained in alignment with the learning objectives of each module and chapter. These explanations encompass text materials, links to AWS sources, external sites such as https://kubernetes.io/, and, most helpful of all, in-context videos. Because this part is so well done, I’d be less verbose in explaining concepts that are already covered here.
For this chapter’s homework, the following video is a must-watch. It’s rather lengthy but it explains the workshop anatomy well and also sets the tone for the rest of the workshop.
My Hands-On Strategy
What I have found helpful to productively and painlessly deal with this and other AWS workshops is to lay out my own step-by-step code execution steps, shell script style, with required parameters, and environment variables setup as appropriate for my AWS account. I also add/modify the CLI commands to expand my learning, as well as, to suit my AWS environment and operating constraints. For example, I might pick a t3.medium EC2 instance instead of a m5.xlarge unless I feel it’s necessary. I might also choose to put my constraints on the number of worker nodes in the cluster or maximum node setting in the Auto Scaling Group, etc. Occasionally I’ve also found bugs that I catch and clean up in my code files to avoid running into them again.
My goal is to make the code behave predictably and it’s repeatable so that I can retry them quickly and after the end of the exercise clean up the resources completely and conveniently to minimize cost. Having said that however, I found that the code and commands given in this particular workshop work as-is most of the time with minimum changes needed compared to other workshops. No matter what though, the strategy remains the same.
Next Steps
After the overview of the workshop in this post, I am going to cover the steps to create the EKS cluster using eksctl tool as covered under the setup section of the workshop. Since the workshop can’t operate without a cluster, that chapter would be a pre-requisite step for every other chapter. Proceed to chapter 2 using the link below.
Hope to see you soon!
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