Use Raspberry Pi 5 as Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes for edge workloads

Use Raspberry Pi 5 as Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes for edge workloads Why Raspberry Pi 5? Architectural overview Getting started Step 1: Create the EKS cluster Step 2: Set up the VPN server Add the Raspberry Pi to the cluster as a remote node Setting up the Container Network Interface Step 1: Install Cilium Deploying a sample application on Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes with edge integration Step 1: Hardware requirements and setup Step 2: Deploy the DynamoDB table Step 3: Deploy the sensor application Step 4: Deploy the frontend dashboard Conclusion About the authors Since its launch, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) has powered tens of millions of clusters so that users can accelerate application deployment, optimize costs, and use the flexibility of Amazon Web Services (AWS) for hosting containerized applications. Amazon EKS eliminates the operational complexities of maintaining Kubernetes control plane infrastructure, while offering seamless integration with AWS resources and infrastructure. However, some workloads need to be run at the edge with real-time processing, such as latency-sensitive applications that generate large volumes of data. In these scenarios, when there is consistent internet connectivity available, users often seek the benefits of cloud integrations while continuing to use their on-premises hardware. That’s why we introduced Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes at AWS re:Invent 2024, so that users can extend their Kubernetes data plane to the edge while continuing to run the Kubernetes control plane in an AWS Region. Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes unifies Kubernetes management across cloud, on-premises, and edge environments by enabling users to use their on-premises infrastructure as nodes in EKS clusters, alongside Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). To demonstrate the use of Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes, we explored a practical use case from the manufacturing sector. These environments often rely on real-time data from digital sensors that must be processed locally due to latency and reliability, while still using the cloud for analytics and long-term storage. Our use case involves reading distance values from an ultrasonic sensor, processing them on a local edge device running as a Hybrid Node, and storing them in Amazon DynamoDB on AWS. In this post, we demonstrate how to implement Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes using the Raspberry Pi 5 , a popular edge computing platform. We cover the following: Setting up an EKS cluster that seamlessly connects cloud and edge infrastructure Securing connectivity using the WireGuard VPN for site-to-site communication Enabling container networking with Cilium for hybrid node deployments Demonstrating a real-world Internet of Things (IoT) application that demonstrates the power of edge-cloud integration The Raspberry Pi 5 is compact and can be deployed at the edge so that you can process data before it is transmitted to the cloud. Building on this strength, we created a microservices-based application partly running on the edge on a Raspberry Pi 5 and partly on AWS in the cloud.