A Step-by-Step Guide to Easily Deploying EKS Infrastructure and Applications Using Terraform

#terraform #kubernetes #community #aws

Terraform is like the wizard of deployment tools. It's an open-source Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool that lets you define and provision infrastructure using a declarative configuration language. Instead of manually setting up infrastructure such as servers, databases, and other resources, you can easily describe your desired infrastructure in code using HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL).

This article focus on project using terraform for EKS , deploying applications using respective manifest files, and an application load balancer ingress controller using Helm.

The Github repository for this project EKS Terraform with application deployment

Below contains the detailed steps in this project, ensure you have an active AWS account before getting started;

List the contents of the terraform files

Initialize terraform on the directory to download required providers

terraform init

Validate the terraform file using :

terraform plan

Apply the terraform configuraton file

terraform apply --auto-approve

Copy the output of the terraform configuration to the ~/.kube/config
Installing aws-iam-authenticator
This enables using AWS IAM credentials to authenticate to a Kubernetes cluster

curl -Lo aws-iam-authenticator https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/aws-iam-authenticator/releases/download/v0.5.9/aws-iam-authenticator_0.5.9_linux_amd64
chmod +x ./aws-iam-authenticator
mkdir -p $HOME/bin && cp ./aws-iam-authenticator $HOME/bin/aws-iam-authenticator && export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin' >> ~/.bashrc

Communicate with Kuberbetes cluster using kubectl get all

Get the pods in the cluster using 'kubectl get pods --all-namespaces'

Deploy the manifest for the pods deployment

kubectl apply -f manifests/deployment.yaml

Validate the deployment using kubectl get pods

Testing the deployment using the port forward

kubectl port-forward hello-kubernetes-6bf86759db-7jf7j 8080:8080

ALB Ingress Controller can be installed with Helm
Install Helm package

$ curl -fsSL -o get_helm.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/main/scripts/get-helm-3
$ chmod 700 get_helm.sh
$ ./get_helm.sh

Install the collection of YAML files necessary to run the ALB Ingress Controller. Add the following repository

helm repo add incubator https://charts.helm.sh/incubator

Install the ALB Ingress Controller in my cluster

helm install ingress incubator/aws-alb-ingress-controller \
  --set autoDiscoverAwsRegion=true \
  --set autoDiscoverAwsVpcID=true \
  --set clusterName=terraform-eks

Deploy the service loadbalancer on the cluster kubectl apply -f manifest/loadbalancer.yaml

Deploy the ingress.yaml for the service

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes-sigs/aws-alb-ingress-controller/v1.1.9/docs/examples/alb-ingress-controller.yaml
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes-sigs/aws-alb-ingress-controller/v1.1.9/docs/examples/rbac-role.yaml