Create and Manage AWS Cluster

Palette supports creating and managing Kubernetes clusters deployed to an AWS account. This section guides you on how to create a Kubernetes cluster in AWS that is managed by Palette.

Prerequisites

The following prerequisites must be met before deploying a cluster to AWS:

• Access to an AWS cloud account

• You have added an AWS account in Palette. Review Add AWS Account for guidance.

• An infrastructure cluster profile. Review Create an Infrastructure Profile for guidance.

• An EC2 Key Pair in the target region.

• Palette creates compute, network, and storage resources in AWS during the provisioning of Kubernetes clusters. Ensure there is sufficient capacity in the preferred AWS region for the creation of the following resources:

  • vCPU
  • VPC
  • Elastic IP
  • Internet Gateway
  • Elastic Load Balancers
  • NAT Gateway
  
  
  info

  The following tags should be added to the virtual private network (VPC) public subnets to enable automatic subnet discovery for integration with AWS load balancer service. Replace the value yourClusterName with your cluster's name.

  • kubernetes.io/role/elb = 1
  • sigs.k8s.io/cluster-api-provider-aws/role = public
  • kubernetes.io/cluster/[yourClusterName] = shared
  • sigs.k8s.io/cluster-api-provider-aws/cluster/[yourClusterName] = owned

• Ensure you don't have an existing security group that starts with the cluster name followed by the text -node in the selected VPC. Palette will automatically create a security group using the cluster name as a prefix followed by the text -node. The format is [name of cluster]-node. If you have an existing security group with the same name, you will need to either rename the existing security group before creating the cluster, or use a different cluster name. Otherwise, the cluster creation will fail due to duplicate resource name in the VPC.

Deploy an AWS Cluster

Use the following steps to provision a new AWS cluster:

1. Log in to Palette and ensure you are in the correct project scope.

2. Navigate to the left Main Menu and click on Clusters

3. Click on Add New Cluster

4. You will receive a prompt asking you if you want to deploy a new cluster or import an existing cluster. Click on Deploy New Cluster

5. Select AWS and click on Start AWS Configuration

6. Populate the wizard page with the following information: name, description, tags and select AWS account. Tags on a cluster are propagated to the VMs deployed to the computing environments. Click on Next after you have filled out all the required information.

7. Select a cluster profile. Click on Next.

8. Review and customize pack parameters, as desired. By default, parameters for all packs are set with values, defined in the cluster profile.

9. Provide the AWS cloud account and placement information.

   Parameter	Description
   Cloud Account	Select the desired cloud account. AWS cloud accounts with AWS credentials need to be pre-configured in project settings.
   Region	Choose the preferred AWS region where you would like to provision clusters.
   SSH Key Pair Name	Choose the desired SSH Key pair. SSH key pairs need to be pre-configured on AWS for the desired regions. The selected key is inserted into the provisioned VMs.
   Static Placement	Check the Static Placement box if you want to deploy resources into pre-existing VPCs and subnets. Review the Static Placement table below to learn more about the required input fields.
   Private API Server LB	Enable to deploy the cluster load balancer in a private subnet. This feature requires Palette to have direct network connectivity with the private subnet or a Private Cluster Gateway deployed in the environment.

   Static Placement

   Parameter	Description
   VPCID	Select the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) ID network from the drop-down Menu.
   Control plane subnet	Select the control plane network from the drop-down Menu.
   Worker Network	Select the worker network from the drop-down Menu.

10. Configure the control plane and worker node pools. A control plane and a worker node pool are configured by default. Refer to the Node Pool documentation to learn more about the node pool configuration.

    This is the section where you can specify the availability zones (AZ), instance types, instance cost type, disk size, and the number of nodes. Click on Next after you have completed configuring the node pool. The minimum number of CPUs and amount of memory depend on your cluster profile, but in general you need at least 4 CPUs and 4 GB of memory both in the control plane pool and across all worker pools.

    info

    You can add new worker pools if you need to customize certain worker nodes to run specialized workloads. As an example, the default worker pool may be configured with the m3.large instance types for general-purpose workloads, and another worker pool with instance type g2.2xlarge can be configured to run GPU workloads.

11. An optional taint label can be applied to a node pool during the cluster creation. For an existing cluster, the taint label can be edited, review the Node Pool management page to learn more. Toggle the Taint button to create a label.

12. Enable or disable node pool taints. If tainting is enabled, then you need to provide values for the following parameters:

    Parameter	Description
    Key	Custom key for the taint.
    Value	Custom value for the taint key.
    Effect	Make the choice of effect from the drop-down menu. Review the effect table bellow for more details.

    Effect Table

    Parameter	Description
    NoSchedule	A pod that cannot tolerate the node taint and should not be scheduled to the node.
    PreferNoSchedule	The system will avoid placing a non-tolerant pod to the tainted node but is not guaranteed.
    NoExecute	New pods will not be scheduled on the node, and existing pods on the node if any on the node will be evicted they do not tolerate the taint.

13. If you checked the Static Placement box in the Cluster config page, you can specify additional AWS security groups to apply to the worker group nodes. Use the Additional Security Groups (Optional) drop-down Menu to select additional security groups.

14. Click on Next.

15. The settings page is where you can configure the patching schedule, security scans, backup settings, and set up Role Based Access Control (RBAC). Review the cluster settings and make changes if needed. Click on Validate.

16. Review the settings summary and click on Finish Configuration to deploy the cluster. Provisioning IaaS clusters can take 15 - 30 minutes depending on the cluster profile and the node pool configuration.

The cluster details page of the cluster contains the status and details of the deployment. Use this page to track the deployment progress.

Validate

You can validate that your cluster is up and available by reviewing the cluster details page.

1. Log in to Palette.

2. Navigate to the left Main Menu and click on Clusters.

3. The Clusters page contains a list of the available clusters Palette manages. Click on the row for the cluster you wish to review its details page.

4. From the cluster details page, verify the Cluster Status field displays Running.

Next Steps

Now that you have a Kubernetes cluster deployed, you can start developing and deploying applications to your clusters. We recommend you review the day two responsibilities and become familiar with the cluster management tasks. Check out the Manage Clusters documentation to learn more about day two responsibilities.