muratcankarakurt/terraform

Create an EKS Cluster and a Jenkins Server with Terraform and Helm

This tutorial includes terraform scripts to deploy an EKS cluster with worker nodes in EC2. Deploys a Jenkins Server on EKS using Jenkins Helm Chart.

Assuming that you have accounts on Github, DockerHub and AWS.

Prerequisites

Following tools must be installed on your environment:

• Terraform
• AWS CLI
• AWS IAM Authenticator
• kubectl
• wget
• helm

You can simply install these tools on macOS with Homebrew:

brew install terraform awscli aws-iam-authenticator kubernetes-cli wget helm

After installing required tools you have to configure your AWS CLI. First you need to create a user named terraform. On AWS console, under Security, Identity, & Compliance menu, select IAM.

• Then click Add user and select Programmatic Access as the access type.
• On the next screen select Attach existing policies directly option on the top menu. Then search for AdministratorAccess and AmazonEKSClusterPolicy policies and select them by clicking the box on the left side of each.
• You may skip tag adding and review screens.
• On the last screen, AWS will provide you the Access key ID and Secret access key.

You may create below two files to complete AWS CLI configuration:

~/.aws/credentials:

[default]
 aws_access_key_id=*****
 aws_secret_access_key=********

~/.aws/config:

[default]
region=us-east-1

or try aws configure to complete it on the command line interactively.

AWS Access Key ID [None]: YOUR_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: YOUR_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
Default region name [None]: YOUR_AWS_REGION
Default output format [None]: json

Setting up Terraform workspace

I have followed up official tutorials of HashiCorp. Here is the link for the external documentations and scripts:

Provision an EKS Cluster (AWS)

Scripts in Hashicorp's github repo

git clone https://github.com/muratcankarakurt/terraform.git
cd terraform

eks-cluster.tf You can configure your cluster_version, tags, instance_types and how many ec2 instances you want.

vpc.tf You can change the VPC configuration. By default, this tutorial creates a VPC with 10.0.0.0/16 network.

jenkins.tf This file creates Jenkins server on EKS with the desired configurations. You may also customize this one.

outputs.tf You can customize the output of terraform script in this file. For example I have added the jenkins admin password in the output.

Run the following commands to create your EKS Cluster:

# Initializing terraform workspace and downloading required providers.
terraform init
# Applying changes on AWS.
terraform apply

You will be prompted to approve terraform apply command. Type yes

This operation may take about 10-15 mins.

Logging into Jenkins on EKS

After the script completes running, you will see an output of terraform. Copy the value of jenkins_password from the output. You can find your public address from AWS Console following these steps:

• Select EC2 under Compute menu.
• From the left menu, select Load Balancers under Load Balancing
• Cilck the related load balancer. You will find the DNS name in the Basic Configuration section.

Type http://<YOUR_LOADBALANCER_ADDRESS>:8080 in browser. Use admin as the user and the password from the terraform output.

Happy automating!

Cleanup the playground

Do not forget to delete AWS resources. You will be charged for this configurations. To delete all the resources you have created run the following command:

terraform destroy

Issues and Errors

• You might have an issue with aws-auth config map while running terraform destroy command. You may simply delete configmap block in terraform.state file and re-run terraform destroy.

Error: Delete "http://localhost/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/configmaps/aws-auth": dial tcp [::1]:80: connect: connection refused

• Sometimes AWS resources cannot be deleted. You can delete them manually and re-run destroy command. I had this issue with ELB, Internet Gateway and VPC.

Play with Jenkins

If you want to do some CI/CD operations on Jenkins that you recently set up, you may check my sampletomcat repo. Find the link in the bottom of the page.

Before you go run this command to use helm effectively in Jenkins. That will create a service account named helm and grants required permissions.

kubectl apply -f helm-user-rbac.yaml

Next: Deploying a Sample Application on EKS using Jenkins and Helm