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Problem Statement
If you’re satisfied with launching EKS nodes using Amazon’s EKS-optimized images, or better yet, using Fargate as a serverless solution, that’s great — you can stop reading and move on. However, if you are in enterprise and you need to launch custom images, be it due to hardening compliance or custom configuration, then you are lucky! I spent about a week pulling my hair out so you can easily follow this post and do it in half a day :)
You may or may not be aware, but you cannot launch EKS nodes with normal amazon linux 2023. You need to add in kubelet and also some other mysterious configurations for it to work. I checked with AWS support and they told me to look at this AWS post to find out how to bake your own image. It is quite complex and worse still, it is pretty much impossible to do in a pure intranet environment. This is because if you inspect the underlying scripts that will be used to bake the images, it actually requires to pull various public dependencies. To make things worse, I don’t know why but this seems to be a very niche problem that after consulting 3 different AWS support dudes, they all just dismissed any other solutions and referred to that same post to make my own AMI.
I also studied other ways to build AMI, which is using AWS EC2 Image Builder…
