In this guide, we will walk through deploying an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) cluster using Terraform, an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool that helps manage and provision cloud resources efficiently.

Prerequisites

Before you get started, make sure that you have the following prerequisites in place:

• An AWS account with necessary permissions
• AWS CLI and Terraform installed and configured on your machine
• Familiarity with AWS, EKS, and Terraform

Steps to Deploy an EKS Cluster

Let’s begin with the deployment of an EKS cluster.

Step 1: Setup Terraform Scripts

First, we need to setup our Terraform scripts. These scripts will help us manage the resources required for our EKS cluster.

Create a new directory for our Terraform scripts and navigate into it.

mkdir terraform-eks && cd terraform-eks

Now, create a new Terraform file named main.tf with the following content:

provider "aws" {
  region = "us-west-2" // Update to your preferred region
}

module "eks" {
  source  = "terraform-aws-modules/eks/aws"
  version = "17.1.0" // Check for the latest version

  cluster_name    = "my-eks-cluster"
  cluster_version = "1.20"
  subnets         = ["subnet-abcde012", "subnet-bcde012a", "subnet-fghi345a"]
  vpc_id          = "vpc-abcde012"

  node_groups = {
    eks_nodes = {
      desired_capacity = 2
      max_capacity     = 10
      min_capacity     = 1

      instance_type = "m5.large"
      key_name      = "my-key-name"
    }
  }
}

Please replace "subnet-abcde012", "subnet-bcde012a", "subnet-fghi345a" and "vpc-abcde012" with your actual VPC and Subnets IDs.

Step 2: Initialize Terraform

It’s time to initialize our Terraform project. This will download the necessary provider plugins for Terraform.

terraform init

Step 3: Apply the Terraform Script

Now, let’s apply our Terraform script, which will create the EKS cluster in AWS.

terraform apply

After running the command, Terraform will show the actions it will perform. Confirm by typing yes.

Conclusion

Congratulations! You’ve successfully deployed an EKS cluster on AWS using Terraform. Now you can deploy your applications on your EKS cluster and take advantage of Kubernetes’ capabilities for your cloud applications.