Managing deployments on Amazon EKS can present significant challenges, especially as teams work to scale applications, maintain consistency, and follow deployment best practices across diverse environments. Coordinating multiple deployment strategies, handling rollbacks, and ensuring minimal downtime often requires considerable manual effort, which can increase the risk of errors, delays, and inefficiencies that slow down application delivery. This is where a CD tool like Spinnaker can be very useful, providing a streamlined and automated way to handle deployments on EKS effectively.
In this Cloud Lab, you’ll learn how to use Spinnaker to deploy applications on EKS. You’ll start by creating the required IAM roles for our Cloud Lab. After this, you’ll create an EKS cluster and deploy a managed node group within that cluster. The parts following this mostly deal with creating and configuring resources for Spinnaker deployment on the EKS cluster. During this part, you’ll install Spinnaker Operator, create an S3 bucket, an IAM identity provider for the EKS cluster, and a couple more IAM roles and service accounts to be used by Spinnaker. Once all that is done, you’ll create and configure an ECR registry for your application to use as the Docker registry. After that, you’ll deploy Spinnaker pods on the EKS cluster using the Spinnaker Operator. Then, by using the Spinnaker UI exposed by the service spun up earlier, you’ll create pipelines for our application and deploy the application on the EKS cluster.
After completing this Cloud Lab, you will understand how to deploy, manage, and automate application deployments on Amazon EKS using Spinnaker. You’ll gain hands-on experience configuring Spinnaker with EKS, setting up a deployment pipeline, and leveraging Spinnaker’s powerful features to streamline the deployment process, enabling efficient and reliable application delivery.
The following is the high-level architecture diagram of the infrastructure you’ll create in this Cloud Lab:
