This guide walks you through setting up Flagger and AWS App Mesh on EKS.
The App Mesh integration with EKS is made out of the following components:
- Kubernetes custom resources
mesh.appmesh.k8s.aws
defines a logical boundary for network traffic between the servicesvirtualnode.appmesh.k8s.aws
defines a logical pointer to a Kubernetes workloadvirtualservice.appmesh.k8s.aws
defines the routing rules for a workload inside the mesh
- CRD controller - keeps the custom resources in sync with the App Mesh control plane
- Admission controller - injects the Envoy sidecar and assigns Kubernetes pods to App Mesh virtual nodes
- Telemetry service - Prometheus instance that collects and stores Envoy's metrics
In order to create an EKS cluster you can use eksctl. Eksctl is an open source command-line utility made by Weaveworks in collaboration with Amazon.
On MacOS you can install eksctl with Homebrew:
brew tap weaveworks/tap
brew install weaveworks/tap/eksctl
Create an EKS cluster with:
eksctl create cluster --name=appmesh \
--region=us-west-2 \
--nodes 3 \
--node-volume-size=120 \
--appmesh-access
The above command will create a two nodes cluster with App Mesh IAM policy attached to the EKS node instance role.
Verify the install with:
kubectl get nodes
Install the Helm v3 command-line tool:
brew install helm
Add the EKS repository to Helm:
helm repo add eks https://aws.github.io/eks-charts
Install the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) metrics provider:
helm upgrade -i metrics-server stable/metrics-server \
--namespace kube-system \
--set args[0]=--kubelet-preferred-address-types=InternalIP
After a minute, the metrics API should report CPU and memory usage for pods. You can very the metrics API with:
kubectl -n kube-system top pods
Install the App Mesh CRDs:
kubectl apply -k github.com/aws/eks-charts/stable/appmesh-controller//crds?ref=master
Create the appmesh-system
namespace:
kubectl create ns appmesh-system
Install the App Mesh controller:
helm upgrade -i appmesh-controller eks/appmesh-controller \
--wait --namespace appmesh-system
In order to collect the App Mesh metrics that Flagger needs to run the canary analysis, you'll need to setup a Prometheus instance to scrape the Envoy sidecars.
Install the App Mesh Prometheus:
helm upgrade -i appmesh-prometheus eks/appmesh-prometheus \
--wait --namespace appmesh-system
Add Flagger Helm repository:
helm repo add flagger https://flagger.app
Install Flagger's Canary CRD:
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fluxcd/flagger/main/artifacts/flagger/crd.yaml
Deploy Flagger in the appmesh-system namespace:
helm upgrade -i flagger flagger/flagger \
--namespace=appmesh-system \
--set crd.create=false \
--set meshProvider=appmesh:v1beta2 \
--set metricsServer=http://appmesh-prometheus:9090
Deploy App Mesh Grafana that comes with a dashboard for monitoring Flagger's canary releases:
helm upgrade -i appmesh-grafana eks/appmesh-grafana \
--namespace appmesh-system
You can access Grafana using port forwarding:
kubectl -n appmesh-system port-forward svc/appmesh-grafana 3000:3000
Now that you have Flagger running, you can try the App Mesh canary deployments tutorial.