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Ownkube

Create a cluster

A cluster is where your deployments run in your own AWS account. This page walks through creating one. If you have not decided on a shape yet, Clusters compares Starter (one EC2 instance, no Ownkube fee) with Production (managed EKS across availability zones).

Before you start

Section titled “Before you start”
  • A connected AWS account. The wizard will not open without one.
  • A rough idea of what you will run. Dev, staging or a side project: Starter. Live traffic that needs to survive an availability zone outage: Production.

From the dashboard

Section titled “From the dashboard”

Open your dashboard and click New cluster.

  1. Choose Starter

    Select Deploy on EC2.

  2. Name and target

    Pick a cluster name (dev, side-project), the AWS account, and a region. Names are lowercase letters, digits and dashes.

  3. Pick an instance type

    InstancevCPUMemoryGood for
    t3.medium24 GiBFirst apps, light prototypes
    t3.large28 GiBSmall production web app and a database
    t3.xlarge416 GiBSeveral services
    t3.2xlarge832 GiBBusy workloads on one node

    You pay AWS for the instance and nothing to Ownkube. Current prices are on the EC2 pricing page.

  4. Review and create

    Starter skips the networking and compute steps. Confirm the summary and click Create cluster. Provisioning takes about five minutes.

From the CLI

Section titled “From the CLI”
Terminal
# Starter: one instance, no Ownkube fee
okctl clusters create --name dev --account <aws-account-id> --region eu-central-1 --type starter --node-type t3.large


# Production: managed EKS with a starting floor of 8 vCPU and 16 GiB
okctl clusters create --name prod --account <aws-account-id> --region eu-central-1 --type production --vcpu 8 --memory 16


# Watch it come up
okctl clusters status <cluster-id>

okctl aws list prints the account IDs you have connected. See the command reference for every flag, including --kubernetes-version, --pods-cidr and --services-cidr.

What happens during provisioning

Section titled “What happens during provisioning”

  1. Account setup, once per AWS account

    On your first cluster, Ownkube creates the shared IAM roles and a regional S3 bucket for state. About a minute, and only once.

  2. VPC and networking

    A new VPC, subnets (public and private across availability zones on Production), NAT and security groups for the cluster.

  3. Control plane

    Production provisions the managed EKS control plane. Starter launches the EC2 instance and bootstraps it.

  4. Platform components

    Ownkube installs the routing, certificate and metrics components that make the platform work.

  5. Active

    The cluster status flips to Active on the dashboard and it appears as a target when you create a deployment.

Creation can be cancelled while it is still running from the cluster page or with okctl clusters cancel <cluster-id>.

After creation

Section titled “After creation”

The cluster page in your dashboard shows node, vCPU and memory telemetry, the VPC details, automatic update settings, and the danger zone. Everything it offers is covered in Clusters.

Limits

Section titled “Limits”
  • One region per cluster. Create separate clusters for separate regions.
  • Shapes do not convert. A Starter cluster cannot become Production. Create the new cluster and copy deployments across.
  • Own-cloud fees land on the same wallet as Compute; Starter adds nothing to it.
Create a deployment Ship to your new cluster once it is active.
Clusters The cluster page, platform updates and the full shape comparison.
Custom domains Put your own domain in front of an app on a Starter cluster.