k3s-aws-cdk

This is a CDK project to deploy a k3s cluster on AWS. After running the CDK stack, you will have a k3s cluster running on an EC2 instance in AWS. The k3s cluster will be deployed using the user data script in the src/user_data.sh file. The user data script will install k3s on the EC2 instance and configure it as a server node.

What is k3s?

k3s is a lightweight Kubernetes distribution that is easy to install and run. It is designed for edge computing, IoT, and CI/CD pipelines. For more information, visit the k3s website.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.8+
• Pip 24.0+
• AWS CLI (Installation guide here)
• AWS CDK Toolkit (Instalwith your AWS account credentials. You can do this by running aws configure and entering your AWS Access Key ID, AWS Secret Access Key, default region name, and default output format.

Confugure AWS CLI

Before you can deploy the CDK stack, you need to configure the AWS CLI with your AWS account credentials. You can do this by running aws configure and entering your AWS Access Key ID, AWS Secret Access Key, default region name, and default output format.

aws configure

Installation

# Create virtualenv
python -m venv .venv

# Activate virtualenv
source .venv/bin/activate

# Upgrade pip
python -m pip install --upgrade pip

# Check pip version
pip --version  #My version is 25.0.1
# Check Python version
python --version  #My version is 3.13.1

# Install requirements
pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

At this point, you can now synthesize the CloudFormation template for this code.

cdk synth

If the CloudFormation template looks good, you can now deploy the stack.

cdk deploy

Before deploying the stack, you can also run a diff to see the changes that will be made to your AWS account.

cdk diff

Expected Output

After deploying the stack, you will have a k3s cluster running on an EC2 instance in AWS. The expected output includes:

• A security group allowing SSH, HTTP, HTTPS, and Kubernetes API access.
• An IAM role with policies for EC2 read-only access, SSM managed instance core, and ECR pull-only access.
• An EC2 instance running the k3s cluster with the specified user data script.
• Public IP address and instance ID of the deployed EC2 instance.

Useful commands

• cdk ls list all stacks in the app
• cdk synth emits the synthesized CloudFormation template
• cdk deploy deploy this stack to your default AWS account/region
• cdk diff compare deployed stack with current state
• cdk docs open CDK documentation

Contributing

TODO

• Create EC2 Autoscaling
• Attach new worker nodes from ASG to the existing master node

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Enjoy!