Deploying Apica Ascent EKS on AWS using custom AMI

1. Overview

This guide will take you through deploying Apica Ascent on an EKS cluster with node groups using custom AMI on AWS using CloudFormation and HELM. The installation will create user roles and policies that are necessary to create a GP3 storage class and a private S3 bucket with default encryption and bucket policies.

2. EKS K8S compatibility

Note: This deployment method using Helm is only supported on Kubernetes versions 1.18, 1.19, and 1.20. Steps described in the document only work if the cluster is created using the given cloud formation template

3. AWS Resources

The Cloud formation template provisions the following resources

  1. S3 Bucket

  2. Launch template with custom AMI

  3. IAM roles and S3 bucket policies

  4. EKS Cluster

  5. EKS Node Pools with custom AMI

4. Pre-requisites

Before you begin, ensure you have the following prerequisites.

  1. You have permission on your AWS account to create an Elastic Kubernetes Service, S3 Bucket.

  2. Pre baked Custom AMI to spin up for EKS managed node groups ( AWS recommended: https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-eks-ami)

  3. KMS Key and appropriate key policy to allow Auto scaling group to access the KMS key (https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/kms-launch-ec2-instance/)

  4. The AWS CLI is installed and configured on your machine

  5. Helm 3 is installed on your machine.

  6. If you choose to use AWS RDS, then follow the guidelines below for your RDS

    • Note down your RDS instance DNS, username, and password handy.

    • Use Postgres V13 RDS type with 100GB storage, io1 with 3000 IOPS.

    • We recommend creating a db.m5.xlarge for deployments ingesting < 500GB/day and db.m5.2xlarge for deployments ingesting > 500GB/day

    • Ensure EKS cluster can connect to AWS RDS Instance. Once the EKS cluster is created, add the security group of EKS cluster in the Postgres security group inbound rules for port 5432

5. Deployment steps

5.1 Create EKS Cluster

Step 1: To prepare for the deployment, first obtain the Cloudformation template that will be used at the URL:

https://logiq-scripts.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/aws-custom-ami.yaml

Step 2: On your AWS Console, navigate to CloudFormation and select Create stack.

Step 3: Provide the options as shown below

  • Under Prerequisite - Prepare template, select Template is ready.

  • Under Specify template > Template source, select Amazon S3 URL - Here you will specify the template URL from Step 1 above.

Step 4: To deploy the EKS cluster, we need to enter the Custom AMI-ID using which the node groups of EKS will be spun up. We need a VPC with 2 subnets. Select them from the Network Configuration and Subnet configuration dropdown lists. Also, provide the ssh-keys for the EKS node groups.

Important: You MUST choose 2 different subnets from the same VPC.

The EKS cluster will need the following node groups. Ensure that you select the node groups as specified in the following table.

Node group
Instance size (min recommended)
Nodes (HA)

ingest

c5.xlarge (4 Core 8 GB RAM)

2

common

c5.2xlarge (8 Core 32 GB RAM)

2

Step 5: Provide the S3 bucket name from section 3, the Cloudformation will create the S3 bucket, S3 bucket name needs to be globally unique.

Step 6: Provide the KMS key ARN

Step 7: Click Next, and follow the instructions on the screen to create the stack.

5.2 Verify EKS setup and tag subnets

Step 1: Once the stack is fully provisioned, connect to the AWS EKS cluster using AWS CLI as mentioned below. To do this, you need to install and configure AWS CLI.

aws eks --region <AWS REGION> update-kubeconfig --name <EKS-cluster-name>

Step 2: Once the EKS cluster is up and running, execute the following commands to check the health of the cluster.

kubectl get namespace
NAME STATUS AGE
default Active 4h57m
kube-node-lease Active 4h57m
kube-public Active 4h57m
kube-system Active 4h57m

Step 3: Tag both subnets used in EKS cloud formation as mentioned below. Replace the cluster name, region, and subnet-id.

aws ec2 create-tags --region <region> --resources <subnet-id> --tags Key="kubernetes.io/cluster/<cluster_name>",Value="shared"

5.3 Enable GP3 storage class for EKS

Step 1: The Amazon Elastic Block Store Container Storage Interface (CSI) Driver provides a CSI interface used by Container Orchestrator to manage the lifecycle of Amazon EBS volumes. To enable GP3 volumes for this stack, run the following commands.

helm repo add aws-ebs-csi-driver https://kubernetes-sigs.github.io/aws-ebs-csi-driver

helm repo update

helm upgrade --install aws-ebs-csi-driver \
--namespace kube-system \
aws-ebs-csi-driver/aws-ebs-csi-driver

Step 2: Once the chart is installed, you should see pods similar to those shown below in your kube-system namespace.

kubectl get pods -n kube-system

ebs-csi-controller-745bf4d44d-9wrps 5/5 Running 0 3h53m
ebs-csi-controller-745bf4d44d-j7xjs 5/5 Running 0 3h53m
ebs-csi-node-fwwn2 3/3 Running 0 3h53m
ebs-csi-node-ksv8z 3/3 Running 0 3h53m

5.4 Deploy Apica Ascent using HELM

Step 1: Download the values file below and customize it per the instructions below.

Step 2: Replace the following variables in the values.yaml from step 1 above and proceed to install the Apica Ascent stack on your EKS cluster.

  1. awsServiceEndpoint: https://s3.<aws-region>.amazonaws.com

  2. s3_bucket: S3 bucket name

  3. s3_region: <s3 region>

Step 3: Create the apica-ascent namespace in your EKS cluster

kubectl create namespace apica-ascent

Step 4: Deploy Apica Ascent stack using helm and updated values file, see below for additional options to customize the deployment for enabling https and to use external Postgres database

helm upgrade --install apica-ascent -n apica-ascent -f values.yaml apica-repo/apica-ascent

Step 5 (Optional): To enable https using self-signed certificates, please add additional options to helm and provide the domain name for the ingress controller. In the example below, replace "ascent.my-domain.com" with the https domain where this cluster will be available.

NOTE: Your DNS will need to be programmed separately to map the domain to the service endpoint for apica-ascent. Please see Step 7 below on how to obtain the service endpoint.

helm upgrade --install apica-ascent -n apica-ascent \
--set global.domain=ascent.my-domain.com \
--set ingress.tlsEnabled=true \
--set kubernetes-ingress.controller.defaultTLSSecret.enabled=true \
-f values.yaml apica-repo/apica-ascent

Step 6 (Optional): If you choose to deploy using AWS RDS, provide the following options below to customize

helm upgrade --install apica-ascent -n apica-ascent \
--set global.environment.postgres_host=<AWS RDS-host-ip/dns> \
--set global.environment.postgres_user=<AWS RDS-username> \
--set global.environment.postgres_password=<AWS RDS-password> \
--set global.chart.postgres=false \
-f values.yaml apica-repo/apica-ascent

Step 7: After the installation is complete execute the below command to get the service endpoint

kubectl -n apica-ascent get svc | grep LoadBalancer
NAME                        TYPE           CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP
logiq-kubernetes-ingress     LoadBalancer <cluster_ip>    <Service end-point>
PreviousApica Ascent on AWS EKS (Private Endpoint) with Aurora PostgreSQL and ElastiCache Redis on prod VPCNextDeploying Apica Ascent EKS with AWS ALB

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