Running the aws-service-operator outside of AWS

[Samze]

Hey,

We noticed in the documentation it states that to deploy the aws service operator you must have a Kubernetes cluster running in AWS.

Is there a particular reason for this and are there plans to support non-aws k8s clusters?

Cheers, Sam & @teddyking

[tantona]

It's possible to run the aws-service-operator in non-aws clusters. I run the operator on my machine on a docker-for-desktop (macOS) cluster for development. What is your use case?

[christopherhein]

@Samze any interest in modifying that text to reflect that this could be run anywhere?

The main thing that might change about this later is when we have in VPC resources, for example, an RDS that requires subnets in your VPC to be provisioned.

Not to say we couldn't use some mechanisms around this for non-AWS running clusters just more out of scope for the current configurations.

[pawelprazak]

A use case I'm interested in is bootstrapping an EKS cluster.

So:

• a person runs the aws-service-operator with a CR describing an EKS cluster (from a laptop/CICD, outside of a cluster)
• an EKS cluster gets created
• aws-service-operator installs itself on the newly created EKS cluster

Basically a self-deployment mechanism.

It's complementary functionality to the approach described in #109 and https://github.com/aws/containers-roadmap/issues/47

[ckrough]

@pawelprazak There is https://github.com/awslabs/aws-eks-cluster-controller, but the parent-child relationship there depends on AWS IAM for auth, etc., so it is dependent on the clusters all being in AWS.

[pawelprazak]

yes, but the first cluster is created manually mostly, you are just moving the problem elsewhere, with self-bootstrap it would be all automatic