Kops Setup

This is largely taken from information given in these documents:

• Kubernetes.io Setup guide: Installing Kubernetes on AWS with kops
• The kops github repo AWS Getting Started
• The kops github repo Building Kubernetes clusters with Terraform

The steps taken to setup the kops directory are in the file kops/setup.sh

The main things that were done are as follows.

• Setup a subdomain
• Run terraform init for backend state data
• Run kops create cluster with the correct arguments

Setup a subdomain under a domain purchased/hosted via AWS

The subdomain kubernetes.aws.empoweredtechnology.net was setup under aws.empoweredtechnology.net and the subdomain NS records were applied to the PARENT hosted zone.

Set up remote state

The only terraform file added to the kops directory by hand was the backend.tf file for storing the terraform state data.

The rest of the *.tf files were added by the kops tool.

Note: It is NOT possible to have multiple kops configurations in the same directory.

Editing the cluster

It's possible to use Terraform to make changes to your infrastructure as defined by kops. In the example below we'd like to change some cluster configs:

$ kops edit cluster \
  --name=kubernetes.aws.empoweredtechnology.net  \
  --state=s3://terraform-tfstate-data

# editor opens, make your changes ...

Then output your changes/edits to kops cluster state into the Terraform files. Run kops update with --target and --out parameters:

$ kops update cluster \
  --name=kubernetes.aws.empoweredtechnology.net  \
  --state=s3://terraform-tfstate-data \
  --out=. \
  --target=terraform

Deleting a cluster

To just remove the AWS resources.

terraform plan -destroy
terraform destroy

To also remove the kops configuration data.

kops delete cluster --yes \
  --name=kubernetes.aws.empoweredtechnology.net \
  --state=s3://terraform-tfstate-data

Ps: You don't have to kops delete cluster if you just want to recreate from scratch. Deleting kops cluster state means that you'll have to kops create again.