Maximize Amazon EKS efficiency: How Auto Mode, Graviton, and Spot work together

Maximize Amazon EKS efficiency: How Auto Mode, Graviton, and Spot work together Solution overview Getting started Steps for scenario 1: Adopting AWS Graviton instances: Reset Amazon EKS Auto Mode cluster before proceeding to scenario 2 Steps for scenario 2: Adopting spot instances and handling workload restrictions: Key features of this NodePool: Key configuration aspects: Verification steps: Verifying workload placement Cleaning up Conclusion About the authors Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Auto Mode streamlines the operation of your Amazon EKS clusters by automating key infrastructure components. This automation streamlines various operational tasks, allowing for more efficient resource allocation and management. By reducing the manual effort required to maintain the infrastructure, Amazon EKS Auto Mode enables teams to focus on higher-level strategic initiatives and application development. While our previous blog covered the core concepts of Amazon EKS Auto Mode, this blog post dives deeper into optimizing Amazon EKS Auto Mode clusters using AWS Graviton and Amazon EC2 Spot instances. AWS customers adopt AWS Graviton instances to achieve up to 40% higher price-performance ratio and up to 60% less energy to meet their sustainability goals. Additionally, AWS customers use Amazon EC2 Spot instances for eligible workloads to save up to 90% on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) On-Demand costs. We will cover AWS Graviton and Amazon EC2 Spot implementations on Amazon EKS Auto Mode through the following two scenarios: Deploy the retail store application (referenced in the previous blog) using exclusively AWS Graviton (ARM64) instances. Deploy the retail store application using a mix of Spot and On-Demand Amazon EC2 instances with the following considerations: Self-managed MySQL, a stateful application using persistent volumes, must run on On-Demand instances as it’s not suitable for Spot instances. While running a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) in Kubernetes is not recommended, we’re using it here solely to demonstrate a stateful workload example. All other applications in the retail store application are eligible to run on Amazon EC2 Spot instances. All the applications in the retail store application can run on AMD64, ARM64, or a mix of both architectures. Self-managed MySQL, a stateful application using persistent volumes, must run on On-Demand instances as it’s not suitable for Spot instances.