Flagger Install on EKS App Mesh

This guide walks you through setting up Flagger and AWS App Mesh on EKS.
App Mesh
The App Mesh integration with EKS is made out of the following components:
Kubernetes custom resources
mesh.appmesh.k8s.aws defines a logical boundary for network traffic between the services 
virtualnode.appmesh.k8s.aws defines a logical pointer to a Kubernetes workload
virtualservice.appmesh.k8s.aws defines the routing rules for a workload inside the mesh
CRD controller - keeps the custom resources in sync with the App Mesh control plane
Admission controller - injects the Envoy sidecar and assigns Kubernetes pods to App Mesh virtual nodes
Telemetry service - Prometheus instance that collects and stores Envoy's metrics
Create a Kubernetes cluster
In order to create an EKS cluster you can use eksctl. Eksctl is an open source command-line utility made by Weaveworks in collaboration with Amazon.
On MacOS you can install eksctl with Homebrew:
brew tap weaveworks/tap
brew install weaveworks/tap/eksctl
Create an EKS cluster with:
eksctl create cluster --name=appmesh \
--region=us-west-2 \
--nodes 3 \
--node-volume-size=120 \
--appmesh-access
The above command will create a two nodes cluster with App Mesh IAM policy attached to the EKS node instance role.
Verify the install with:
kubectl get nodes
Install Helm
Install the Helm v3 command-line tool:
brew install helm
Add the EKS repository to Helm:
helm repo add eks https://aws.github.io/eks-charts
Enable horizontal pod auto-scaling
Install the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) metrics provider:
helm upgrade -i metrics-server stable/metrics-server \
--namespace kube-system \
--set args[0]=--kubelet-preferred-address-types=InternalIP
After a minute, the metrics API should report CPU and memory usage for pods. You can very the metrics API with:
kubectl -n kube-system top pods
Install the App Mesh components
Install the App Mesh CRDs:
kubectl apply -k github.com/aws/eks-charts/stable/appmesh-controller//crds?ref=master
Create the appmesh-system namespace:
kubectl create ns appmesh-system
Install the App Mesh controller:
helm upgrade -i appmesh-controller eks/appmesh-controller \
--wait --namespace appmesh-system
In order to collect the App Mesh metrics that Flagger needs to run the canary analysis, you'll need to setup a Prometheus instance to scrape the Envoy sidecars.
Install the App Mesh Prometheus:
helm upgrade -i appmesh-prometheus eks/appmesh-prometheus \
--wait --namespace appmesh-system
Install Flagger
Add Flagger Helm repository:
helm repo add flagger https://flagger.app
Install Flagger's Canary CRD:
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fluxcd/flagger/main/artifacts/flagger/crd.yaml
Deploy Flagger in the appmesh-system namespace:
helm upgrade -i flagger flagger/flagger \
--namespace=appmesh-system \
--set crd.create=false \
--set meshProvider=appmesh:v1beta2 \
--set metricsServer=http://appmesh-prometheus:9090
Install Grafana
Deploy App Mesh Grafana that comes with a dashboard for monitoring Flagger's canary releases:
helm upgrade -i appmesh-grafana eks/appmesh-grafana \
--namespace appmesh-system
You can access Grafana using port forwarding:
kubectl -n appmesh-system port-forward svc/appmesh-grafana 3000:3000
Now that you have Flagger running, you can try the App Mesh canary deployments tutorial.

Last modified 2yr ago