Setting Up Your Environment Variables

Starting with setting up your environment variables is the most efficient approach. Please adjust these variables based on your specific AWS region:

export AWS_REGION=us-west-2
export EKS_VERSION=1.29
export CLUSTER_NAME=solo-io-gloo-mesh-workshop
NUMBER_NODES=3

# Choose from compatible options - for example, the compute-optimized family with 8 vCPUs and 16.0 GiB of memory
NODE_TYPE="c7i.xlarge"

Deploy Your Cluster with eksctl

Use the following eksctl command to create your cluster. This command initiates the creation of CloudFormation stacks — one for the cluster and another for deploying the nodes:

eksctl create cluster --region $AWS_REGION \
  --name $CLUSTER_NAME \
  --nodes $NUMBER_NODES \
  --node-type $NODE_TYPE \
  --version=$EKS_VERSION

eksctl output example

Deployment will take 10-30 minutes and at the end your kubecontext will be pointing to this instance.

Now you’re ready to dive into the workshop!