Provision EKS Cluster with ArgoCD by Terraform

In previous stories, I have shown you how to control application deployment on Kubernetes by ArgoCD. You can check my profile if you are new reader.

Now, let’s go back to the basic, which is provisioning the infrastructure before we can do any deployment. In this story, we will provision a EKS cluster on your AWS account and deployed ArgoCD server in this cluster by Terraform.

Requirements

1. An AWS Account (Open new account)
2. Terraform installed in your machine (Official tutorial)
3. AWS CLI installed in your machine (Official tutorial)
4. Git installed in your machine (Official tutorial)

As we need some paid services provided by AWS, you should expect there will be a small charge following the steps. In my case, it would be few dollars maximum if you destroy all the resources at the end.

Let’s get started!

Generate IAM Access Key Pair

As to authenticate with AWS, we will need a pair of IAM Access Key.

1. Go to IAM on AWS console
2. Click Users from the menu at the left
3. Choose the user with the permission to create all the necessary resources
4. Choose Security credentials from the tabs
5. Click the Create access key button and follow the instructions to save your key pair safely

Add the key pair to your local AWS CLI

After you have generated the key pair, we need to configure it so as to allow AWS CLI to authenticate to AWS servers.

Open the terminal and run aws configure. Follow the prompts and input your credentials.

Then, you can test if the configuration has done correctly by using aws sts get-caller-identity. You should see similar output as below showing the information of your access key pair, otherwise, there should be misconfiguration.

Clone the GitHub repository

I have prepared a GitHub repository that includes all necessary Terraform files.

GitHub - yukccy/terraform-argocd-on-eks: Terraform repository for an ArgoCD server on EKS cluster…

Open your terminal and run git clone command to clone this repository.

Execution

1. Go to the folder you have just cloned from GitHub.
2. Run terraform init to initialize a working Terraform directory
3. Run terraform plan to see the execution plan which Terraform will create for you on AWS
4. Run terraform apply to apply the plan. You will need to type yes to permit the execution

Wait for the execution completes, then you can go AWS console to check if those resources are created.

You can also access to ArgoCD server UI by using the DNS name of the Application Load Balancer created by Kubernetes Ingress which exposed the service of ArgoCD server. Try to create Kubernetes manifests by using ArgoCD now.

Post execution

As mentioned at the beginning, you need to destroy everything created by Terraform to prevent extra cost.

Execute terraform destroy and type yes when it prompts to ask for permission.

Make sure everything has been deleted on AWS console.