AWS Operator

The AWS Operator allows you to create custom AWS specific resources using Kubernetes CRDs or Custom Resource Definitions. These help with defining your applications including all the necessary components such as Amazon RDS databases, Amazon ElasticCache resources, Amazon SQS queues and many more.

Using the AWS Operator allows your to use processes like gitops to keep your clusters in a specified state with the internal control loop managing the lifecycle of those components.

To make this all possible we merge together Kubernetes CRDs with an operator which interacts with Amazon Cloudformation to keep the AWS resources in-sync with the control loop.

Getting Started

First thing that you will need to do is install an Pod to IAM management layer such as kube2iam. This will allow you to create an AWS IAM role that gives access to create resources. For an example policy check the examples/iam-policy.json.

To get started with kube2iam go [here](https://github.com/jtblin/kube2iam)

After you have installed kube2iam we need to do is deploy the aws-operator this runs as a pod in your Kubernetes cluster and listen for new CRD’s of the aws type and creates the resource and allocates a kubernetes Service to connect to it.

You’ll want to download the operator file like so

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/christopherhein/aws-operator/master/configs/aws-operator.yaml

Then edit the file and replace {{POD-ARN}} with the pod ARN you created for kube2iam

Last install the manifest with the pod ARN specified.

# Install RBAC
kubectl apply -f aws-operator.yaml

To test this create a file like this

# s3bucket.yml
apiVersion: operator.aws/v1alpha1
kind: S3Bucket
metadata:
  name: some-name-for-your-bucket
spec:
  bucketName: some-name-for-your-bucket
  versioning: false
  logging:
    enabled: true
    prefix: "archive"
  tags:
  - key: service
    value: kube

Then install like you would any other manifest file.

kubectl apply -f s3bucket.yml

This will communicate directly with Cloudformation to create the S3 bucket using the parameters you have passed in. If you’d like to see the progress you can view the status directly via kubectl.

kubectl get s3buckets <bucket-name> -w
// TODO: add output.

To learn more about the other resources please visit the documentation at Documentation