Requirements for EKS Anywhere on Bare Metal

Bare Metal provider requirements for EKS Anywhere

To run EKS Anywhere on Bare Metal, you need to meet the hardware and networking requirements described below.

Administrative machine

Set up an Administrative machine as described in Install EKS Anywhere.

Compute server requirements

The minimum number of physical machines needed to run EKS Anywhere on bare metal is 1. To configure EKS Anywhere to run on a single server, set controlPlaneConfiguration.count to 1, and omit workerNodeGroupConfigurations from your cluster configuration.

The recommended number of physical machines for production is at least:

  • Control plane physical machines: 3
  • Worker physical machines: 2

The compute hardware you need for your Bare Metal cluster must meet the following capacity requirements:

  • vCPU: 2
  • Memory: 8GB RAM
  • Storage: 25GB

Operating system requirements

If you intend on using a non-Bottlerocket OS you must build it using image-builder. See the OS Management Artifacts page for help building the OS.

Upgrade requirements

If you are running a standalone cluster with only one control plane node, you will need at least one additional, temporary machine for each control plane node grouping. For cluster with multiple control plane nodes, you can perform a rolling upgrade with or without an extra temporary machine. For worker node upgrades, you can perform a rolling upgrade with or without an extra temporary machine.

When upgrading without an extra machine, keep in mind that your control plane and your workload must be able to tolerate node unavailability. When upgrading with extra machine(s), you will need additional temporary machine(s) for each control plane and worker node grouping. Refer to Upgrade Bare Metal Cluster and Advanced configuration for upgrade rollout strategy .

NOTE: For single-node clusters that require an additional temporary machine for upgrading, if you don’t want to set up the extra hardware, you may recreate the cluster for upgrading and handle data recovery manually.

Network requirements

Each machine should include the following features:

  • Network Interface Cards: at least one NIC is required. It must be capable of network booting.

  • BMC integration (recommended): an IPMI or Redfish implementation (such a Dell iDRAC, RedFish-compatible, legacy or HP iLO) on the computer’s motherboard or on a separate expansion card. This feature is used to allow remote management of the machine, such as turning the machine on and off.

NOTE: BMC integration is not required for an EKS Anywhere cluster. However, without BMC integration, upgrades are not supported and you will have to physically turn machines off and on when appropriate.

Here are other network requirements:

  • All EKS Anywhere machines, including the Admin, control plane and worker machines, must be on the same layer 2 network and have network connectivity to the BMC (IPMI, Redfish, and so on).

  • You must be able to run DHCP on the control plane/worker machine network.

NOTE: If you have another DHCP service running on the network, you need to prevent it from interfering with the EKS Anywhere DHCP service. You can do that by configuring the other DHCP service to explicitly block all MAC addresses and exclude all IP addresses that you plan to use with your EKS Anywhere clusters.

  • If you have not followed the steps for airgapped environments , then the administrative machine and the target workload environment need network access (TCP/443) to:

    • public.ecr.aws

    • anywhere-assets.eks.amazonaws.com: to download the EKS Anywhere binaries, manifests and OVAs

    • distro.eks.amazonaws.com: to download EKS Distro binaries and manifests

    • d2glxqk2uabbnd.cloudfront.net: for EKS Anywhere and EKS Distro ECR container images

    • api.ecr.us-west-2.amazonaws.com: for EKS Anywhere package authentication matching your region)

    • d5l0dvt14r5h8.cloudfront.net: for EKS Anywhere package ECR container images

    • api.github.com: only if GitOps is enabled

    • sts.amazonaws.com: only if AWS IAM Authenticator is enabled

  • Two IP addresses routable from the cluster, but excluded from DHCP offering. One IP address is to be used as the Control Plane Endpoint IP. The other is for the Tinkerbell IP address on the target cluster. Below are some suggestions to ensure that these IP addresses are never handed out by your DHCP server. You may need to contact your network engineer to manage these addresses.

    • Pick IP addresses reachable from the cluster subnet that are excluded from the DHCP range or

    • Create an IP reservation for these addresses on your DHCP server. This is usually accomplished by adding a dummy mapping of this IP address to a non-existent mac address.

NOTE: When you set up your cluster configuration YAML file, the endpoint and Tinkerbell addresses are set in the controlPlaneConfiguration.endpoint.host and tinkerbellIP fields, respectively.

Validated hardware

Through extensive testing in a variety of on-premises environments, we have validated Amazon EKS Anywhere on bare metal works without modification on most modern hardware that meets the above requirements. Compatibility is determined by the host operating system selected when Building Node Images . Installation may require you to Customize HookOS for EKS Anywhere on Bare Metal to add drivers, or modify configuration specific to your environment. Bottlerocket support for bare metal was deprecated with the EKS Anywhere v0.19 release.