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MNG basics

Before you start

Prepare your environment for this section:

~$prepare-environment fundamentals/mng/basics

In the Getting started lab, we deployed our sample application to EKS and saw the running Pods. But where are these Pods running?

We can inspect the default managed node group that was pre-provisioned for you:

~$eksctl get nodegroup --cluster $EKS_CLUSTER_NAME --name $EKS_DEFAULT_MNG_NAME

There are several attributes of managed node groups that we can see from this output:

  • Configuration of minimum, maximum and desired counts of the number of nodes in this group. In this context the minimum and maximum are simply set bounds for the underlying Autoscaling Group, enabling compute autoscaling will be explored in the respective labs.
  • The instance type for this node group is m5.large
  • AL2023_x86_64_STANDARD indicates its using the Amazon EKS optimized Amazon Linux 2023 AMI, see the documentation for more information.

We can also inspect the nodes and the placement in the availability zones.

~$kubectl get nodes -o wide --label-columns topology.kubernetes.io/zone

You should see:

  • Nodes are distributed over multiple subnets in various availability zones, providing high availability

Over the course of this module we'll make changes to this node group to demonstrate the basic capabilities of MNGs.