In this presentation, I will unveil how we developed a platform to enhance practical DevOps skills for our students. I will share insights into utilizing AWS EKS with Karpenter to establish labs that rapidly deploy and decommission, ensuring cost-effectiveness.

1. Using EKS with
Karpenter autoscaling
DevOps Practising Platform:

2. !2
What is here for you.
• Your skill acquiring fast line.
• A smooth autoscaling for your Kubernetes cluster.
• An opinionated structure for your Terraform code.
• The ideal interesting dev environment in K8s.

3. !3
To know vs to be able to use

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The ultimate goal - Unconscious Competence

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Psychological limitations
• Our brain saves mental energy as much as possible.
• Monkey mind always chatting.
• Conscious mind has bandwidth limits.
• Teachers conspiracy.
• Tendency to live in illusions.

6. !6
Addressing the psychological limitations.
• Learning by doing.
• Building real life end-to-end application from the very beginning.
• A very small testable steps.
• Time for contemplation.

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Technical limitations.
• Nothing could be installed on student’s computer.
• COST.
• Many movings parts.
• Potentially compromised student computers.

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The example of Lab environment setup
• Python with required modules.
• Editor within required extensions.
• Terminal with AWS access.
• Prometheus server running
• Jupyter
• Grafana
• Kubectl pointed to personal namespace

9. December 5, 2022 !9
Outside view of the Platform

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Editor with Terminal in a browser

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Assessments.

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Particular training related services
• GitLab
• Jenkins
• Prometheus
• Jupyter
• Grafana
• …

13. December 5, 2022 !13
Wow tools and results.

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WOW results.
• Everything is in a browser - VS Code editor, terminal with aws cli,
kubectl, terraform, helm. Almost zero setup is required.
• COST!
• It took less than 20 minutes to spawn a complicated environment. A few
minutes to get a new student environment.
• Setup and tear down goes by one command.

15. !15
WOW tools.
• Kubernetes.
• Coder (VSCode in a browser)
• Terraform, modules created by Anton Babenko
• Karpenter
• AWS Spot instances

16. December 5, 2022 !16
Inside view of the Platform

17. !17
Layered setup with Terraform

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Terraform modules
e
module "eks" {
source = "terraform-aws-modules/eks/aws"
version = “19.17.2"
cluster_name = var.tag
cluster_security_group_tags = {
"karpenter.sh/discovery" = var.tag
}
node_security_group_tags = {
"karpenter.sh/discovery" = var.tag
}
…

19. !19
Kubernetes
• EKS
• ALB controller
• Prometheus Operator and Loki.
• CSI driver
• … all the standard stuff with StatefulSets and Deployments defined in TF

20. !20
karpenter.sh for Kubernetes cluster autoscaling
• Choose the right instance type.
• Create a new working node really fast.
• Scale down is fast as well.
• Takes care about Spot instances reboot by listening on AWS health events.
• Takes care about correct availability zone according mounted volumes.

21. !21
To be continued
• Work is very much in progress.
• More stuff via linkedin.com/in/dmitrikozhevin/
• https://github.com/Luxoft-Academy/fwdays2024