Final Clean Up

Key Takeaways

When deploying to AWS, the infrastructure becomes more complex compared to running Kubernetes locally. Despite having multiple worker nodes, interacting with the cluster using kubectl still feels like interacting with a single, unified entity.

Cluster Creation with eksctl:

• When creating a cluster using eksctl, you can specify the desired node type and the number of worker nodes.

• AWS offers a wide range of instance types, such as t3.medium, t3.large, or m5.xlarge. You can view all the available options in the AWS documentation and choose one that fits your budget and performance requirements.

• Here's an example command to create a cluster with eksctl:

  eksctl create cluster \
    --name my-cluster \
    --region us-west-2 \
    --node-type t3.medium \
    --nodes 3
  

Ingress Controller and Load Balancer:

• When you deploy an nginx controller to your AWS cluster, it automatically provisions a load balancer.

• The load balancer is a physical server on AWS that receives external traffic via an external IP address.

• It balances the incoming traffic across the nodes running the nginx controller.

• In the current configuration, the rules are permissive, allowing any host to connect and routing all traffic to the same service:

  apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
  kind: Ingress
  metadata:
    name: grade-submission-portal-ingress
    namespace: grade-submission
  spec:
    ingressClassName: nginx
    rules:
    - http:
        paths:
        - pathType: Prefix
          path: "/"
          backend:
            service:
              name: grade-submission-portal
              port:
                number: 5001
  

• This setup is suitable for development environments but may not be ideal for production.

Production Environment Considerations:

• In a production environment, after purchasing a domain and pointing it to the load balancer's external IP, you can implement more restrictive rules:

  spec:
    rules:
    - host: grades.myuniversity.com
      http:
        paths:
        - path: "/"
          pathType: Prefix
          backend:
            service:
              name: grade-submission-portal
              port:
                number: 5001
  

• By specifying a host (e.g., grades.myuniversity.com) in the Ingress rules, you can limit traffic to only be routed to the service from that specific host, providing an additional layer of security and control over incoming traffic.