EKS AMI init process should not rely on non-standard tags and AWS CLI

[Max Williams]

Hi,
I am a maintainer of a Terraform module that creates an EKS cluster and worker groups. We would really like to support the Ubuntu EKS AMI but currently the init process of the AMI (/var/lib/cloud/scripts/per-instance/00-EKS-config.sh) relies on finding the cluster name from Cloudformation tags, max pods number from "com.ubuntu.cloud:eks:*" tags and runs the AWS CLI to get CA cert.

Therefore, I would like to suggest that the AMI use an init process that is similar to the default AWS EKS AMI. This process runs a shell script where you can pass the attributes directly to the script. Here's the PR where this was changed in their AMI:
https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-eks-ami/pull/16

If the attributes are passed to the script, like CA cert and cluster endpoint, it does not rely on finding tags and calling EKS API via AWS CLI. This is a much more flexible solution and would allow our Terraform module to support the Ubuntu EKS AMI.

I know you have a "Customization example" here https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/docs/aws/eks/ but this means we would need to write and own the init process for the Ubuntu AMI, which is not ideal.

Let me know your thoughts.

FYI here's our PR to support the Ubuntu EKS AMI: https://github.com/terraform-aws-modules/terraform-aws-eks/pull/127

Thanks,
Max

[Suren Nihalani (snihalani4)]

adding myself as a subscriber

[Max Williams (user9037259)]

Any update on this?

[Balduin (je-eppler)]

According to the Terraform registry [1] the Terraform AWS EKS module is now provisioned over 44 000 times since it's inception in June 2018. It build a community around it with 46 contributors and many more users [2]. In total there are 14 releases of the module [3] and it is actively maintained by two core maintainers.

However, support for Ubuntu is still missing. It would be great to have support for the Ubuntu EKS AMI. There are people which would prefer the stability and maturity of Ubuntu.

[1] https://registry.terraform.io/modules/terraform-aws-modules/eks/aws/

[2] https://github.com/terraform-aws-modules/terraform-aws-eks/graphs/contributors

[3] https://github.com/terraform-aws-modules/terraform-aws-eks/releases

[Joshua Powers (powersj)]

Hi,

I am currently going through old bugs and checking or providing on status.

The Ubuntu optimized EKS images that are published today currently use a similar mechanism to the Amazon Linux images. We also use a boostrap script that takes the cluster name and it is commonly called via user data. The same goes for cfn-signal.

As such I am going to mark this as fix released. The latest Ubuntu EKS optmized images are published here: https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/docs/aws/eks/ If you find additional issues please feel free to file a new bug and let us know.

Thanks!