Prerequisites

The instructions in this section assume that you will be running the commands to create and configure your AWS EKS cluster on a host that has been setup with the appropriate tools to do so.

AWS CLI tools

The currently released AWS CLI tools do not support Nitro yet (Nitro is still in “preview”) so don’t use the apt, yum or snap versions of the AWS CLI. Older versions do not support nitro. You must use the AWS CLI installer from the link below:

$ curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip"
$ unzip awscliv2.zip
$ sudo ./aws/install
$ sudo yum install git procps

Once you have the AWS CLI installed, you must configure it with your AWS credentials. When it asks for the “Default output format”, enter json:

$ aws configure
AWS Access Key ID [None]: [AWS Access Key ID]
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: [AWS Secret Access Key]
Default region name [None]: us-east-2
Default output format [None]: json

Docker

Follow the official instructions to install Docker for your platform:

https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/

kubectl

The official instructions for installing kubectl are here: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/install-kubectl/

The following commands will set up your Linux host with kubectl:

$ curl -LO "https://dl.k8s.io/release/$(curl -L -s https://dl.k8s.io/release/stable.txt)/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl"
$ sudo install -o root -g root -m 0755 kubectl /usr/local/bin/kubectl
$ kubectl version --client

Some systems do not automatically include /usr/local/bin in the PATH environment variable (Amazon Linux 2, for example). If this is the case for your system, please run the following command:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin

You can also add this command to your bash profile (~/.bash_profile) to make the change permanent.