AWS Service Operator

The AWS Service Operator allows you to manage AWS resources using Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions.

Using the AWS Service Operator enables a gitops workflow to drive your infrastructure to the desired state leveraging Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions (CRD), the Kubernetes internal control loop, and AWS cloudformation orchestration. Read more about "operators" here.

Prerequisites

To get started you will need

• a Kubernetes cluster running in AWS. Check out EKS or kops to get started

• kubectl

• awscli

Getting Started

Make sure your Kubernetes cluster is up and running and you’ve configured your awscli for the approriate account and region you’ll be working in.

IAM permissions management

You will need to install an IAM management layer such as kube2iam. This will allow you to use an AWS IAM role to manage a pod’s access to AWS resources.

To get started with kube2iam go here or check out the helm chart

The aws-service-operator runs as a pod in your Kubernetes cluster and listens for new aws type CRDs. When a new CRD is created the operator will create the resource in AWS via cloudformation and create a Kubernetes Service for access within the cluster.

Create an IAM role for the aws-service-operator

The `K8S_WORKER_NODE_IAM_ROLE` is the IAM role assigned to your kubernetes worker instances.

aws cloudformation create-stack \
  --stack-name aws-service-operator-role \
  --capabilities CAPABILITY_NAMED_IAM \
  --template-body file://configs/aws-service-operator-role.yaml \
  --parameters \
    ParameterKey=WorkerArn,ParameterValue=<K8S_WORKER_NODE_IAM_ROLE>

Your resulting IAM role arn should look something like arn:aws:iam::<ACCOUNT_ID>:role/aws-service-operator

Deploy the aws-service-operator

Before applying these resources make sure to replace the following placeholders with the approriate information in configs/aws-service-operator.yaml

• <ACCOUNT_ID> - Your AWS Account ID

• <REGION> - The AWS Region you’re working in

• <CLUSTER_NAME> - The name of your cluster

• <BUCKET_NAME> - (optional) The operator stores certain things in s3 create a bucket or provide an existing bucket for the operator to use i.e. aws s3 mb s3://foobar

1. Create the operator

kubectl apply -f configs/aws-service-operator.yaml

2. Create the cloudformation templates (cft) used by the operator

kubectl apply -f examples/cloudformationtemplates

3. (optional) Follow the operator logs

kubectl logs -f -n aws-service-operator deploy/aws-service-operator

4. Create an ecr repository with the operator

kubectl apply -f examples/ecrrepository.yaml

The operator will communicate directly with Cloudformation to create the ecr repository using the parameters you have passed in. If you’d like to see the progress you can view the status directly via kubectl.

5. Check the ecr resource in Kubernetes

kubectl describe ecr example-repository-name

Removing everything

If you would like to tear everything down - run the following commands.

IMPORTANT this will not remove anything you created with the AWS cli (ecr repo for the operator itself, IAM roles etc.)

kubectl delete ecr example-repository-name
kubectl get crd | grep ".operator.aws" | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kubectl delete crd
kubectl delete -f configs/aws-service-operator.yaml