Get started with AWS Fargate for your cluster - Amazon EKS
Step 1: Ensure that existing nodes can communicate with Fargate PodsStep 2: Create a Fargate Pod execution roleStep 3: Create a Fargate profile for your clusterStep 4: Update CoreDNSNext steps

Get started with AWS Fargate for your cluster

Important

AWS Fargate with Amazon EKS isn’t available in AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West).

This topic describes how to get started running Pods on AWS Fargate with your Amazon EKS cluster.

If you restrict access to the public endpoint of your cluster using CIDR blocks, we recommend that you also enable private endpoint access. This way, Fargate Pods can communicate with the cluster. Without the private endpoint enabled, the CIDR blocks that you specify for public access must include the outbound sources from your VPC. For more information, see Control network access to cluster API server endpoint.

Prerequisite

An existing cluster. If you don’t already have an Amazon EKS cluster, see Get started with Amazon EKS.

Step 1: Ensure that existing nodes can communicate with Fargate Pods

If you’re working with a new cluster with no nodes, or a cluster with only managed node groups (see Simplify node lifecycle with managed node groups), you can skip to Step 2: Create a Fargate Pod execution role.

Assume that you’re working with an existing cluster that already has nodes that are associated with it. Make sure that Pods on these nodes can communicate freely with the Pods that are running on Fargate. Pods that are running on Fargate are automatically configured to use the cluster security group for the cluster that they’re associated with. Ensure that any existing nodes in your cluster can send and receive traffic to and from the cluster security group. Managed node groups are automatically configured to use the cluster security group as well, so you don’t need to modify or check them for this compatibility (see Simplify node lifecycle with managed node groups).

For existing node groups that were created with eksctl or the Amazon EKS managed AWS CloudFormation templates, you can add the cluster security group to the nodes manually. Or, alternatively, you can modify the Auto Scaling group launch template for the node group to attach the cluster security group to the instances. For more information, see Changing an instance’s security groups in the Amazon VPC User Guide.

You can check for a security group for your cluster in the AWS Management Console under the Networking section for the cluster. Or, you can do this using the following AWS CLI command. When using this command, replace my-cluster with the name of your cluster.

aws eks describe-cluster --name my-cluster --query cluster.resourcesVpcConfig.clusterSecurityGroupId

Step 2: Create a Fargate Pod execution role

When your cluster creates Pods on AWS Fargate, the components that run on the Fargate infrastructure must make calls to AWS APIs on your behalf. The Amazon EKS Pod execution role provides the IAM permissions to do this. To create an AWS Fargate Pod execution role, see Amazon EKS Pod execution IAM role.

Note

If you created your cluster with eksctl using the --fargate option, your cluster already has a Pod execution role that you can find in the IAM console with the pattern eksctl-my-cluster-FargatePodExecutionRole-ABCDEFGHIJKL. Similarly, if you use eksctl to create your Fargate profiles, eksctl creates your Pod execution role if one isn’t already created.

Step 3: Create a Fargate profile for your cluster

Before you can schedule Pods that are running on Fargate in your cluster, you must define a Fargate profile that specifies which Pods use Fargate when they’re launched. For more information, see Define which Pods use AWS Fargate when launched.

Note

If you created your cluster with eksctl using the --fargate option, then a Fargate profile is already created for your cluster with selectors for all Pods in the kube-system and default namespaces. Use the following procedure to create Fargate profiles for any other namespaces you would like to use with Fargate.

You can create a Fargate profile using either of these tools:

eksctl

This procedure requires eksctl version 0.194.0 or later. You can check your version with the following command:

eksctl version

For instructions on how to install or upgrade eksctl, see Installation in the eksctl documentation.

To create a Fargate profile with eksctl

Create your Fargate profile with the following eksctl command, replacing every example value with your own values. You’re required to specify a namespace. However, the --labels option isn’t required.

eksctl create fargateprofile \
    --cluster my-cluster \
    --name my-fargate-profile \
    --namespace my-kubernetes-namespace \
    --labels key=value

You can use certain wildcards for my-kubernetes-namespace and key=value labels. For more information, see Fargate profile wildcards.

AWS Management Console

To create a Fargate profile with AWS Management Console

  1. Open the Amazon EKS console.

  2. Choose the cluster to create a Fargate profile for.

  3. Choose the Compute tab.

  4. Under Fargate profiles, choose Add Fargate profile.

  5. On the Configure Fargate profile page, do the following:

    1. For Name, enter a name for your Fargate profile. The name must be unique.

    2. For Pod execution role, choose the Pod execution role to use with your Fargate profile. Only the IAM roles with the eks-fargate-pods.amazonaws.com service principal are shown. If you don’t see any roles listed, you must create one. For more information, see Amazon EKS Pod execution IAM role.

    3. Modify the selected Subnets as needed.

      Note

      Only private subnets are supported for Pods that are running on Fargate.

    4. For Tags, you can optionally tag your Fargate profile. These tags don’t propagate to other resources that are associated with the profile such as Pods.

    5. Choose Next.

  6. On the Configure Pod selection page, do the following:

    1. For Namespace, enter a namespace to match for Pods.

      • You can use specific namespaces to match, such as kube-system or default.

      • You can use certain wildcards (for example, prod-*) to match multiple namespaces (for example, prod-deployment and prod-test). For more information, see Fargate profile wildcards.

    2. (Optional) Add Kubernetes labels to the selector. Specifically add them to the one that the Pods in the specified namespace need to match.

      • You can add the label infrastructure: fargate to the selector so that only Pods in the specified namespace that also have the infrastructure: fargate Kubernetes label match the selector.

      • You can use certain wildcards (for example, key?: value?) to match multiple namespaces (for example, keya: valuea and keyb: valueb). For more information, see Fargate profile wildcards.

    3. Choose Next.

  7. On the Review and create page, review the information for your Fargate profile and choose Create.

Step 4: Update CoreDNS

By default, CoreDNS is configured to run on Amazon EC2 infrastructure on Amazon EKS clusters. If you want to only run your Pods on Fargate in your cluster, complete the following steps.

Note

If you created your cluster with eksctl using the --fargate option, then you can skip to Next steps.

  1. Create a Fargate profile for CoreDNS with the following command. Replace my-cluster with your cluster name, 111122223333 with your account ID, AmazonEKSFargatePodExecutionRole with the name of your Pod execution role, and 0000000000000001, 0000000000000002, and 0000000000000003 with the IDs of your private subnets. If you don’t have a Pod execution role, you must create one first (see Step 2: Create a Fargate Pod execution role).

    Important

    The role ARN can’t include a path other than /. For example, if the name of your role is development/apps/my-role, you need to change it to my-role when specifying the ARN for the role. The format of the role ARN must be arn:aws:iam::111122223333:role/role-name.

    aws eks create-fargate-profile \
    --fargate-profile-name coredns \
    --cluster-name my-cluster \
    --pod-execution-role-arn arn:aws:iam::111122223333:role/AmazonEKSFargatePodExecutionRole \
    --selectors namespace=kube-system,labels={k8s-app=kube-dns} \
    --subnets subnet-0000000000000001 subnet-0000000000000002 subnet-0000000000000003

  2. Run the following command to remove the eks.amazonaws.com/compute-type : ec2 annotation from the CoreDNS Pods.

    kubectl patch deployment coredns \
    -n kube-system \
    --type json \
    -p='[{"op": "remove", "path": "/spec/template/metadata/annotations/eks.amazonaws.com~1compute-type"}]'

Next steps

  • You can start migrating your existing applications to run on Fargate with the following workflow.

    1. Create a Fargate profile that matches your application’s Kubernetes namespace and Kubernetes labels.

    2. Delete and re-create any existing Pods so that they’re scheduled on Fargate. For example, the following command triggers a rollout of the coredns deployment. You can modify the namespace and deployment type to update your specific Pods.

      kubectl rollout restart -n kube-system deployment coredns

  • Deploy the Route application and HTTP traffic with Application Load Balancers to allow Ingress objects for your Pods running on Fargate.

  • You can use the Adjust pod resources with Vertical Pod Autoscaler to set the initial correct size of CPU and memory for your Fargate Pods, and then use the Scale pod deployments with Horizontal Pod Autoscaler to scale those Pods. If you want the Vertical Pod Autoscaler to automatically re-deploy Pods to Fargate with higher CPU and memory combinations, set the Vertical Pod Autoscaler’s mode to either Auto or Recreate. This is to ensure correct functionality. For more information, see the Vertical Pod Autoscaler documentation on GitHub.

  • You can set up the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) collector for application monitoring by following these instructions.