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.