VMware AWS Quickstart

These are the CloudFormation templates for the VMware AWS Quick Start. This is where active development is happening.

Details of the Quick Start are in this Heptio Blog post.

Amazon's page for this is here.

This will be updated and pushed regularly to https://github.com/aws-quickstart/quickstart-vmware.

Deploying the latest release

The canonical way to deploy this Quick Start is by following the "Deploy on AWS into a new VPC" link on this project's AWS Quick Start Page.

You can see what's behind that link by checking AWS's fork of VMware's repository at https://github.com/aws-quickstart/quickstart-vmware. The master branch of github.com/heptio/aws-quickstart is merged into AWS's repository and deployed to the Quick Start page on a monthly basis.

Latest release from the command line

You can also deploy the latest release of this Quick Start via the command line using the helper script provided in this repo.

Deploying latest master

You can try changes from this repository before they are released on the AWS Quick Start page using the AWS Console.

Launch Latest Quickstart Now

Master branch from the command line

You can deploy the master branch of this Quick Start using the provided script.

Deploying local changes

Use the provided script boot-cloud-from-local.sh. This will upload your local directory and run the cluster-with-new-vpc template on cloud formation.

If you're making changes to things like the Kubernetes version or anything installed in the base AMI, you'll also need to rebuild the AMI with Wardroom. See the "Local development" section below for more details.

Optionally, aws-quickstart also supports overriding a few select kubernetes binaries (kubelet, kubeadm, kubectl) at runtime for development purposes. To replace these binaries at runtime, simply place your custom versions into the $S3_PREFIX/bin/ folder:

Optionally, aws-quickstart also supports overriding a few select kubernetes binaries (kubelet, kubeadm, kubectl) at runtime for development purposes. To replace these binaries at runtime, simply place your custom versions into the ${S3_PREFIX}bin/ folder:

$ aws s3 ls s3://quickstart/overrides/bin/
2017-09-08 13:04:02   71453136 kubeadm
2017-09-08 12:58:27   72501019 kubectl
2017-09-08 12:58:27  146464528 kubelet

These will be downloaded during cloudformation initialization and subsequently become available to the running instance.

Wardroom Images

To ensure that the wardroom-sourced AMIs are the ones we expect, our CI checks that the tags in wardroom.json match the tags for every AMI in the cloudformation template. If the AMI images are updated, wardroom.json will need to be changed as well to, at minimum, the new commit hash.

Using the cluster

# Wait for the cluster to be up and running
aws cloudformation wait stack-create-complete --stack-name $STACK

# Get the command to download the kubeconfig file for the cluster
KUBECFG_DL=$(aws cloudformation describe-stacks --stack-name=$STACK --query 'Stacks[0].Outputs[?OutputKey==`GetKubeConfigCommand`].OutputValue' --output text)
echo $KUBECFG_DL
eval $KUBECFG_DL

# Set an environment variable to tell kubectl where to find this file
export KUBECONFIG=$(pwd)/kubeconfig
kubectl get nodes

Local development

This Quick Start is developed as a set of AWS CloudFormation templates. This is a brief overview of the files in this repo, for more architecture details see the Deployment Guide

The templates directory:

• kubernetes-cluster.template sets up the resources that the Kubernetes cluster depends on. Mainly this is the API load balancer, the master node, the auto-scaling group of kubelet nodes, and the various security groups required to allow them to talk to one another. The nodes in this template are created from a base AMI, which you can recreate using wardroom.
• kubernetes-cluster-with-new-vpc.template sets up a new VPC with a public and private subnets, and calls out to kubernetes-cluster.template as a sub-stack.

The scripts directory:

This contains files that are required by the templates. This is to avoid inlining a lot of text directly in the template files. Templates access files from this directory by referencing their S3 URL's, which is why this directory and the templates directory both need to be copied into S3 in order to be used.

Some notable files in this directory:

• setup-k8s-master.sh.in: This file is run by the master node on first boot as part of its initialization. It is a Mustache template file, with template variables that are set by the kubernetes-cluster.template template. Note that this template file does not install the Kubernetes binaries, those are baked into the AMI.
• calico.yaml, weave.yaml: These are networking add-ons which are applied with kubectl by the master after the Kubernetes cluster is initialized.