1. Admin Machine

EKS Anywhere will create and manage Kubernetes clusters on multiple providers. Currently we support creating development clusters locally using Docker and production clusters from providers listed on the providers page.

Creating an EKS Anywhere cluster begins with setting up an Administrative machine where you run all EKS Anywhere lifecycle operations as well as Docker, kubectl and prerequisite utilites. From here you will need to install eksctl , a CLI tool for creating and managing clusters on EKS, and the eksctl-anywhere plugin, an extension to create and manage EKS Anywhere clusters on-premises, on your Administrative machine. You can then proceed to the cluster networking and provider specific steps . See Create cluster workflow for an overview of the cluster creation process.

NOTE: For Snow provider, if you ordered a Snowball Edge device with EKS Anywhere enabled, it is preconfigured with an Admin AMI which contains the necessary binaries, dependencies, and artifacts to create an EKS Anywhere cluster. Skip to the steps on Create Snow production cluster to get started with EKS Anywhere on Snow.

Administrative machine prerequisites

System and network requirements

• Mac OS 10.15+ / Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS or 22.04 LTS / RHEL or Rocky Linux 8.8+
• 4 CPU cores
• 16GB memory
• 30GB free disk space
• If you are running in an airgapped environment, the Admin machine must be amd64.
• If you are running EKS Anywhere on bare metal, the Admin machine must be on the same Layer 2 network as the cluster machines.

Here are a few other things to keep in mind:

• If you are using Ubuntu, use the Docker CE installation instructions to install Docker and not the Snap installation, as described here.

• If you are using EKS Anywhere v0.15 or earlier and Ubuntu 21.10 or 22.04, you will need to switch from cgroups v2 to cgroups v1. For details, see Troubleshooting Guide.

• If you are using Docker Desktop, you need to know that:

  • For EKS Anywhere Bare Metal, Docker Desktop is not supported
  • For EKS Anywhere vSphere, if you are using EKS Anywhere v0.15 or earlier and Mac OS Docker Desktop 4.4.2 or newer "deprecatedCgroupv1": true must be set in ~/Library/Group\ Containers/group.com.docker/settings.json.

Tools

• Docker 20.x.x or above
• curl
• yq

Install EKS Anywhere CLI tools

Via Homebrew (macOS and Linux)

You can install eksctl and eksctl-anywhere with homebrew . This package will also install kubectl and the aws-iam-authenticator which will be helpful to test EKS Anywhere clusters.

brew install aws/tap/eks-anywhere

Manually (macOS and Linux)

Install the latest release of eksctl. The EKS Anywhere plugin requires eksctl version 0.66.0 or newer.

curl "https://github.com/eksctl-io/eksctl/releases/latest/download/eksctl_$(uname -s)_amd64.tar.gz" \
    --silent --location \
    | tar xz -C /tmp
sudo install -m 0755 /tmp/eksctl /usr/local/bin/eksctl

Install the eksctl-anywhere plugin.

RELEASE_VERSION=$(curl https://anywhere-assets.eks.amazonaws.com/releases/eks-a/manifest.yaml --silent --location | yq ".spec.latestVersion")
EKS_ANYWHERE_TARBALL_URL=$(curl https://anywhere-assets.eks.amazonaws.com/releases/eks-a/manifest.yaml --silent --location | yq ".spec.releases[] | select(.version==\"$RELEASE_VERSION\").eksABinary.$(uname -s | tr A-Z a-z).uri")
curl $EKS_ANYWHERE_TARBALL_URL \
    --silent --location \
    | tar xz ./eksctl-anywhere
sudo install -m 0755 ./eksctl-anywhere /usr/local/bin/eksctl-anywhere

Install the kubectl Kubernetes command line tool. This can be done by following the instructions here .

Or you can install the latest kubectl directly with the following.

export OS="$(uname -s | tr A-Z a-z)" ARCH=$(test "$(uname -m)" = 'x86_64' && echo 'amd64' || echo 'arm64')
curl -LO "https://dl.k8s.io/release/$(curl -L -s https://dl.k8s.io/release/stable.txt)/bin/${OS}/${ARCH}/kubectl"
sudo install -m 0755 ./kubectl /usr/local/bin/kubectl

Upgrade eksctl-anywhere

If you installed eksctl-anywhere via homebrew you can upgrade the binary with

brew update
brew upgrade aws/tap/eks-anywhere

If you installed eksctl-anywhere manually you should follow the installation steps to download the latest release.

You can verify your installed version with

eksctl anywhere version

Prepare for airgapped deployments (optional)

For more information on how to prepare the Administrative machine for airgapped environments, go to the Airgapped page.

Deploy a cluster

Once you have the tools installed, go to the EKS Anywhere providers page for instructions on creating a cluster on your chosen provider.