I have long been an advocate of deploying Kubernetes clusters on bare metal servers for various reasons I have called out – https://www.vamsitalkstech.com/?s=Bare+metal. Glad to announce that a project I have been involved in a big way over the last year is now GA – AWS customers can now deploy full BMaaS (Bare Metal as a Service) using EKS-A! This expands the range of use cases for EKS-A across Telco/5G, Retail and Edge workloads.
At launch in September 2021, Amazon EKS Anywhere enabled you to create and operate clusters using on-premises infrastructure with VMware vSphere. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon EKS Anywhere on bare metal, which gives you a broader choice of deployment options for running Kubernetes on-premises. You can now automate all steps from bare metal hardware provisioning all the way up to a running Kubernetes cluster through a workflow built on open-source tooling. AWS supports all Amazon EKS Anywhere components including integrated third-party software so you can reduce support costs and accelerate your modernization journey by leveraging AWS as a single point of contact for Kubernetes tooling and support.
Running Kubernetes on bare metal infrastructure is complex, requiring specialized expertise and significant customer investment in time and the tools needed to automate Kubernetes cluster lifecycle management. Customers have to hire or develop these specialized skills to build elaborate tooling and allocate valuable resources to infrastructure operations rather than focus on business innovation. Customers said that using a virtualization layer alleviates some of these problems but adds software licensing and support costs. In summary, to run Kubernetes clusters on bare metal infrastructure, customers spend time, effort, and money on tasks that amount to undifferentiated heavy lifting.
Infrastructure requirements for running Amazon EKS Anywhere on bare metal
Amazon EKS Anywhere gives you the flexibility of using a bundled open-source toolset to manage Kubernetes deployments on bare metal infrastructure. You can configure server bootstrapping, cluster size, networking, storage, and software components through a workflow that uses Tinkerbell (a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project). Once the cluster is provisioned, you can manage the cluster lifecycle using Amazon EKS Anywhere tooling built on the foundation of Cluster API.
You can create clusters with a high-availability architecture or reduced availability architecture. The minimum requirements for each bare metal node (including, control plane and worker nodes) are published here. To get started, you provide a comma-separated values (CSV) file with hardware inventory information and a cluster configuration file (YAML) as inputs to the workflow. Amazon EKS Anywhere manages and monitors bare metal servers via the baseboard management controller using Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) and Redfish protocols. Through extensive testing in a variety of on-premises customer environments during our beta phase, we expect Amazon EKS Anywhere on bare metal to run on most generic hardware that meets these requirements. In addition, we have collaborated with our hardware original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners (Dell, HP, Lenovo, Supermicro, and others) to provide you a list of validated hardware. You can choose Bottlerocket (default) or Ubuntu as the operating system for running your clusters. Bottlerocket is an open-source Linux distribution purpose-built to host containers. It includes only the essential components and permissions needed to support the orchestrator and container runtime, yielding a rapid startup, smaller footprint, reduced potential attack surface and lower overall management overhead.
Full Announcement here –
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/introducing-bare-metal-deployments-for-amazon-eks-anywhere/