Overview
EKSA Bare metal is a Kubernetes service provided by Amazon Web Services, on physical servers rather than virtual machines. This approach can offer improved performance and cost savings, as well as the ability to use specialized hardware such as GPUs. Additionally, it can also be useful for situations where running on bare metal is a compliance requirement. This is a great option for businesses and organizations that require high-performance, dedicated servers for their critical applications. With a wide range of configurations and additional services, EKSA Bare metal servers can be tailored to meet the specific needs of any organization.
Explore our blog for deeper insights on EKS Anywhere Bare Metal Cluster Management, available here!
EKSA includes Tinkerbell, which enables the management of a Kubernetes cluster on your own bare metal infrastructure. Tinkerbell is an open-source tool for cloud-native bare metal provisioning and configuration automation. It provides a way to automate the process of provisioning, configuring, and maintaining physical servers in a data center, making it easier to manage large-scale bare metal deployments.
Users can provision an EKSA Bare metal Cluster via the following methods:
Prerequisites¶
- Ensure the hardware machines (admin, control plane and worker node machines) are connected to network
- Ensure to have the Operating System to install on the hardware
- A machine running Ubuntu or Centos operating system is required to install the gateway agent and also the machine should have a connectivity to interact with the controller
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The admin machine (where gateway is installed) must be on the same Layer 2 network as the cluster machines (Bare Metal provider only)
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For Gateway Machine: Mac OS 10.15 / Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS, 4 CPU cores, 16GB memory, 30GB free disk space
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For control plane and worker node machine(s): vCPU: 2, Memory: 8GB RAM, Storage: 25GB
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Why Rafay¶
We have developed remote provisioning and ongoing lifecycle management workflows on top of AWS's eksctl CLI for EKS Anywhere. This adds an extra layer of convenience over eksctl which is a command-line based utility where the user needs to manually prepare a huge template for provisioning, and there is no debug channel provided. Tha table below highlights some of the benefits over the eksctl CLI.
| Features | Rafay | eksctl |
|---|---|---|
| User Interface | Yes, with easy-to-use UI and CLI | No, command line based utility |
| Template Generation | Automated, based on few user inputs | Manual, user needs to prepare huge template |
| Debugging Channel | Yes, provided for insights into provisioning steps | No, need to look at machine and eksctl logs |
| Data Center Access | Not Required. Rafay Gateway facilitates secure access | Requires direct access to data center |
| Automated Software Installation on Admin Machine | Yes, for prerequisite tools like Docker, eksctl, kubectl | No, users must manually install and manage |
Getting Started¶
We have quick start exercise to explore the platform's capabilities for "Lifecycle Management" of Amazon EKS Anywhere Cluster on Bare Metal.