DevOps Classroom notes 07/Mar/2026

EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service)

• Amazon specific features
  • Managed control plane
  • Managed node groups
  • EKS Auto mode
  • AWS Fargate
  • EKS Pod identity and IRSA style service account based IAM access
  • VPC CNI
  • AWS Loadbalancer controller
  • Cloudwatch observability add-ons
  • Security groups for Pods
  • Extended K8s Version support
  • Cluster insights
  • Outposts, Local Zones and Hybrid Nodes
• AWS EKS Deployment models
  • Standard EKS + managed Node groups
  • EKS + Fargate
  • EKS Auto mode

Create an eks cluster

• To create eks cluster we need
  • aws cli
  • kubectl
  • eksctl
• We need IAM Permissions to create VPC, EKS, EC2, IAM roles and related resources

You are an expert in AWS and I want you list out the steps to create a standard EKS Cluster with nodegroups. Ensure you give me steps from setting up IAM with right permission, installing tools required. I want to create EKS cluster using eksctl and yaml.

• Create a eksctl yaml file and Refer Here for schema
• eks-cluster.yaml

apiVersion: eksctl.io/v1alpha5
kind: ClusterConfig

metadata:
  name: my-eks-cluster
  region: us-west-2        # Change to your region
  version: "1.35"           # Kubernetes version
  tags:
    Environment: development
    Team: platform

# Optional: Use existing VPC or let eksctl create one
# vpc:
#   id: "vpc-xxxxxxxx"
#   subnets:
#     private:
#       us-west-2a: { id: subnet-xxxxxxxx }
#       us-west-2b: { id: subnet-yyyyyyyy }
#     public:
#       us-west-2a: { id: subnet-zzzzzzzz }
#       us-west-2b: { id: subnet-wwwwwwww }

# IAM OIDC provider (required for IRSA - IAM Roles for Service Accounts)
iam:
  withOIDC: true

# CloudWatch logging for control plane
cloudWatch:
  clusterLogging:
    enableTypes:
      - api
      - audit
      - authenticator
      - controllerManager
      - scheduler

# Node Groups
managedNodeGroups:

  # General purpose node group
  - name: ng-general
    instanceType: t3.medium
    minSize: 2
    maxSize: 5
    desiredCapacity: 2
    volumeSize: 50
    volumeType: gp3
    amiFamily: AmazonLinux2
    privateNetworking: true       # Nodes in private subnets
    availabilityZones:
      - us-west-2a
      - us-west-2b
    labels:
      role: general
      environment: development
    tags:
      NodeGroup: general
      k8s.io/cluster-autoscaler/enabled: "true"
      k8s.io/cluster-autoscaler/my-eks-cluster: "owned"
    iam:
      attachPolicyARNs:
        - arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonEKSWorkerNodePolicy
        - arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonEKS_CNI_Policy
        - arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonEC2ContainerRegistryReadOnly
      withAddonPolicies:
        autoScaler: true
        cloudWatch: true
        albIngress: true
        ebs: true
    ssh:
      enableSsm: true             # Use SSM instead of SSH keys (more secure)

# Add-ons
addons:
  - name: vpc-cni
    version: latest
  - name: coredns
    version: latest
  - name: kube-proxy
    version: latest
  - name: aws-ebs-csi-driver
    version: latest
    wellKnownPolicies:
      ebsCSIController: true

• when we create an eks cluster
  • eks cluster control plane (0.1 $ per hour)
  • vpc and subnets
  • a managed node group
  • security groups
  • IAM Roles
  • we also get vpc-cni, coredns, kube-proxy
• We need to mention annoations for creating different types of loadbalancers

Give me annoation list to create different types of loadbalancers in 
EKS in a tabular format

• Storage: AWS has different types of storages, We can install CSI Drivers and implement any type of storage for Pods.
  • EBS
  • EFS
  • S3

Give me steps to install efs and s3 csi and storage classes into eks cluster