Developer EKS Access

Pre-reqs

  • an environment variable GITHUB_TOKEN set to a classic GitHub token with read:org permissions.
  • Latest (as of 02-19-2025) aws-cli is installed and available on your $PATH.
  • kubectl >= 1.30 is installed and available on your $PATH. (Newer is better, usually)
  • Cloned copy of ol-infrastructure
  • Should run with a standard python install with hvac installed. Alternatively, follow the instructions in ol-infrastructure/README.md.

Overview

This document will guide you through the process of setting up your local environment to access the EKS cluster. This will allow you to interact with applications deployed into EKS, including tailing logs and opening a shell into the running containers.

Extra Reading

For more information about kubeconfig files, refer to the Kubernetes documentation here and here.

Steps

  1. Within your cloned copy of ol-infrastructure, navigate to the eks directory at src/ol_infrastructure/infrastructure/aws/eks.
  2. There is a script in this directory called login_helper.py that will help you set up your local environment to access the EKS cluster. Run this script with the following command:
python login_helper.py aws_creds

  1. This will return several export AWS_ statements on stdout that you can then run in your current shell. You need ALL of them. Additionally, it will include the timestamp of when these credentials will expire. By default they expire in one hour, but you can change that to 8 hours with -d 480 argument. 8 hours is the maximum allowed.

  2. After running the export commands on your shell, run the following command to generate a kubeconfig file:

python login_helper.py kubeconfig
  1. This will generate a kubeconfig file on stdout that will define contexts to all active clusters. Each context is named for the cluster so for example operations-ci, applications-qa, and so on.
  2. You can save this kubeconfig file to your local machine for kubectl to use with the following:
python login_helper.py kubeconfig > ~/.kube/config
  1. Additionally, you can specify a default current context with --set-current-context <context> argument. 
python login_helper.py kubeconfig --set-current-context applications-qa > ~/.kube/config
  1. Or you can set it by hand once you've saved your kubeconfig file:
kubectl config use-context applications-qa
  1. You can now interact with the EKS cluster using kubectl. For example, to list all pods in the learn-ai namespace of the applications-qa cluster:
kubectl get pods -n learn-ai

Other Interesting kubectl Commands

  • Get all the pods for the learn-ai namespace:
kubectl get pods -n learn-ai
  • Get all the pods in the learn-ai namespace with more information:
kubectl get pods -n learn-ai -o wide
  • Describe a pod, which can tell you interesting things like the pod's IP address, the node it's running on, and the events that have happened to it, as well as the containers that make up the pod:
kubectl describe pod <pod-name> -n learn-ai
  • Output the logs of a pod in the learn-ai namespace. kubectl will makes its best guess at which container to output logs from:
kubectl logs <pod-name> -n learn-ai
  • Be specific and output the logs from the nginx container. 
kubectl logs <pod-name> -n learn-ai -c nginx
  • tail or follow the logs of the nginx container in a pod in the learn-ai namespace:
kubectl logs -f <pod-name> -n learn-ai -c nginx
  • Open a shell into the nginx container of a pod in the learn-ai namespace:
kubectl exec -it <pod-name> -n learn-ai -c nginx -- /bin/bash