EKS Cluster Setup with Terraform
Introduction
EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) is AWS's managed Kubernetes offering. AWS handles the
control plane; you just manage the worker nodes. We'll set it up using Terraform,
combining your IaC skills with Kubernetes.
Why This Matters
Kind is great for learning, but production ML systems run on managed Kubernetes:
- High availability control plane (AWS manages it)
- Integration with AWS services (IAM, ALB, EBS, etc.)
- GPU node groups for training
- Auto-scaling based on demand
Setting up EKS with Terraform teaches you:
- How production clusters are provisioned
- The relationship between VPC, subnets, and Kubernetes networking
- Node groups and instance types
- IAM roles for service accounts (IRSA)
This is a core MLOps skill — you'll likely set up or maintain EKS clusters.
Tasks
Hint: EKS needs specific subnet tags — the module handles this
Hint: terraform destroy (but you might want to keep it for later sections)