How to: EKS Basics
-	📒 [Homepage](https://aws.amazon.com/eks/) ∙ [User guide](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/what-is-eks.html) ∙ [FAQ](https://aws.amazon.com/eks/faq/) ∙ [Pricing](https://aws.amazon.com/eks/pricing/)
- EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) is a new service (launched June 2018) that provides managed Kubernetes Masters in a Highly Available pair to deploy K8s Services and Pods on top of EC2 based Kubernetes nodes.
- See the [Containers and AWS](#containers-and-aws) section for more context on containers.
- EKS is AWS's solution to hosting Kubernetes natively on AWS. It is not a replacement for ECS directly but is in response to the large market dominance of Kubernetes.
- EKS does not launch EC2 nodes and would have to be configured and setup either manually or via Cloudformation (or other automation solution)
- EKS management is done through a utility called kubectl, and with Kube configuration files. These files will need to be configured to speak with the K8s Master with a certificate and URL. The AWS CLI can autogenerate the configuration file that kubectl requires for communicating with the cluster.
[1](#user-content-eks-aws-cli-create-kubeconfig)
- EKS authentication is integrated with IAM roles/permissions. The AWS CLI has an integrated sub-command for generating authentication tokens.
[2](#user-content-eks-aws-cli-get-token)
This was formerly done via a custom plugin for kubectl called [aws-iam-authenticator](https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/aws-iam-authenticator) (formerly heptio-authenticator-aws).
- EKS provides [Calico](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/calico.html) from Tigera for securing workloads within a cluster using Kubernetes network policy.

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