The Kubernetes Current Blog

How to Provision and Manage Amazon EKS Distro (EKS-D) Using Rafay

Today Amazon announced Amazon EKS Distro (EKS-D), a Kubernetes distribution based on and used by Amazon EKS. EKS-D enables organizations to create reliable and secure Kubernetes clusters using the same versions of Kubernetes and its dependencies deployed by Amazon EKS. With EKS-D, organizations that wish to standardize and use the exact same Kubernetes distribution as they use with Amazon EKS, can do so now for their non-AWS environments as well.

Each EKS-D release follows the EKS process, verifying new Kubernetes versions for compatibility. The EKS-D source code, open source tooling, binaries and container images as well as configuration are provided for reproducible builds via public Git and S3 storage locations.

With EKS-D, Amazon provides extended support for Kubernetes versions after community support expires, providing updated builds of previous versions including the latest security patches.


The Rafay Kubernetes Management Cloud (MKP): An Open Kubernetes Platform

The Rafay Kubernetes Management Cloud (MKP) is an open platform with a foundational philosophy that customers should be able to use their preferred Kubernetes distribution in their operating environments.

Using the Rafay MKP, customers can now easily provision and manage the lifecycle of EKS-D for their on-premises (bare metal or VM) and other cloud environments such as Azure and GCP.

On bare metal and VM environments, customers can use the MKP’s declarative or wizard-based approach to automate the provisioning and ongoing lifecycle management of EKS-D. Check out our YouTube channel for a video of the steps below.

 

Amazon EKS-D

Organizations can also use the Rafay MKP to provision EKS-D based Kubernetes clusters in GCP and Azure cloud environments:

 

Amazon EKS-D

Once the EKS-D based Kubernetes cluster is successfully provisioned, customers can use the Rafay MKP for cluster dashboards addressing visibility and monitoring requirements to the entire fleet of Kubernetes clusters:

 

Amazon EKS-D

EKS-D based Kubernetes clusters can be provisioned and managed in secure isolation boundaries (i.e. Projects) configured with fine-grained role-based access control (RBAC).

Developers and operation personnel can be configured to access these clusters from anywhere using the Rafay MKP’s Zero-Trust Kubectl Access feature for both web and Kubectl CLI type access.


Availability & Support for EKS-D

General availability for EKS-D in the Rafay MKP is available in January 2021.


Managed (any) Kubernetes with the Rafay MKP

Rafay’s MKP automates cluster and application management at scale across all infrastructures — on-premises, public clouds, and edge networks — and supports the most popular K8s distribution best used for each. As a result, organizations have freedom of choice and aren’t locked-in to using any single Kubernetes distribution across their infrastructure.

Visit our website to learn more about Rafay’s Kubernetes Management Cloud, see our video on provisioning Amazon EKS-D and sign up for a free trial.

 

Support for EKS Anywhere

AWS also announced EKS Anywhere today, an on-premise Kubernetes offering that customers can leverage to experience the broad EKS capabilities in their data centers. This offering will be made available by AWS at some point in 2021. When this offering is ready for use, customers will be able to leverage the Rafay Kubernetes Management Cloud to manage the lifecycle of their on-premises EKS clusters. Rafay will continue to be our customers’ multi-cluster management and K8s operations partner regardless of distribution or environment.

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Tags:
Amazon , Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service , Anthos , AWS , Azure , Azure Kubernetes Service , Cloud Native , EKS , EKS Distro , EKS-D , GCP , Google Anthos , K8s , Kubernetes

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