Cluster architecture

The cluster we are going to set up in this chapter will be formed of two EC2 instances—one that will run all the components for the Kubernetes control plane and another worker node that you can use to run your applications.

Because we start from scratch, this chapter will also lay out one method for isolating your Kubernetes cluster in a private network while allowing you easy access to the machines from your own workstation.

We will achieve this by using an additional instance as a bastion host that will allow incoming SSH connections from the outside world, as shown in the following diagram. If your AWS account already has some infrastructure in place that can achieve this, then feel free to skip this section: