GitHub Action Runners on AWS EKS

Today, I will show you how to use GitHub Action Runners on AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service). To make this work, we will need a few other components installed in the cluster, such as:

• GitHub Actions Controller
• Karpenter: Just-in-time Nodes for EKS

I'm assuming you already have an existing EKS cluster, but if you don't, clone the simple-eks Terraform, I put together here: https://github.com/mahmoodr786/simple-eks. Do not use this terraform for production, as it creates the EKS as public and private. Although it only allows your Public IP, the recommendation is to keep your cluster private and access it using a VPN or Bastion. It also allows more IAM permissions than you need to get everything operational.

git clone https://github.com/mahmoodr786/simple-eks
cd simple-eks
terraform apply

This might take 10 to 15 minutes to complete. Once completed, you should see your cluster and the node group.

To access your cluster, you must get the Kube Config by running the following command.

aws eks update-kubeconfig --name simple-eks-cluster --region us-east-1

To confirm you can reach the cluster, run the following command:

kubectl get pods -A

Now that we have the cluster ready let's deploy the two controllers we need using Helm. We will start with Karpenter.

helm registry logout public.ecr.aws

helm upgrade --install karpenter oci://public.ecr.aws/karpenter/karpenter --version "0.36.2" --namespace kube-system --create-namespace \
  --set "settings.clusterName=simple-eks-cluster" \
  --set controller.resources.requests.cpu=0.5 \
  --set controller.resources.requests.memory=1Gi \
  --set controller.resources.limits.cpu=0.5  \
  --set controller.resources.limits.memory=1Gi \
  --set controller.ttlSecondsAfterEmpty=300