Run Amazon EKS on RHEL Worker Nodes with IPVS Networking

Introduction

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (Amazon EKS) provides excellent abstraction from managing the Kubernetes control plane and data plane nodes that are responsible for operating and managing a cluster. AWS offers managed Amazon Machine Images, or AMIs, for Amazon Linux 2, Bottlerocket, and Windows Server. Many customers have requirements, or simply prefer, to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for all their Linux machines. Although RHEL isn’t officially supported for Amazon EKS, customers can build Amazon EKS worker nodes on RHEL using the scripts in this post.

An Amazon EKS cluster has built-in add-ons for networking: The Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) container network interface (CNI) plugin for Kubernetes, CoreDNS and kube-proxy components. Each of these components plays a vital role for Kubernetes networking. Of these components, kube-proxy is responsible for maintaining the network rules that allow network communication to your Pods from network sessions …