Prepare an EKS cluster

To install Istio on an Amazon EKS cluster, you need to download and configure eksctl and AWS CLI with your active AWS account.

Once you have eksctl and AWS CLI configure, you can create a cluster. For example:

export KUBERNETES_VERSION=1.30

eksctl create cluster --nodes 3 --version $KUBERNETES_VERSION

This deploys an Amazon EKS cluster with three nodes in your default region using Kubernetes 1.30.

Kubernetes context

To install Istio on an Amazon EKS cluster, you need to set up the Kubernetes context. If you create your cluster using command line, your Kubernetes context is automatically set. However, if you created your cluster using AWS Management Console UI, you need to set the context manually.

Ensure your AWS CLI is properly configured. Then, run the following command:

export CLUSTER_NAME=MyCluster
export REGION=us-east-1

aws eks --region REGION update-kubeconfig --name $CLUSTER_NAME

Where REGION is the region where you deployed your cluster and CLUSTER_NAME is the name of your cluster.

You can verify your cluster, for example, by running the following command:

kubectl get svc

Output from kubectl get svc

NAME         TYPE        CLUSTER-IP   EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)   AGE
kubernetes   ClusterIP   10.100.0.1   <none>        443/TCP   3d18h