Amazon EKS - Deploy Cilium CNI and Secure Pod Communications using Network Policies

Cilium is an open source software for providing, securing and observing network connectivity between container workloads - cloud native, and fueled by the revolutionary Kernel technology eBPF.

In this Lab scenario, you'll learn how to reconfigure an EKS cluster to utilize Cilium as it's CNI provider. 

You'll also learn how to deploy a sample Star Wars themed application into the cluster, and then secure it using Cilium based Network Policies.

May the force be with you!

Note: This lab may take up to 25 minutes to deploy. Please ensure you have enough time before starting.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this Lab, you will be able to:

• Reconfigure EKS to utilize Cilium as it's CNI provider
• Deploy a sample Star Wars themed application
• Secure Pod inter-communication using Cilium based Network Policies

Intended Audience

This lab is intended for:

• Kubernetes practitioners
• DevOps Engineers

Lab Prerequisites

You should be familiar with:

• Basic Linux command line administration
• Basic Kubernetes and Container-based concepts

Consider taking the following courseware in preparation for this lab:

• Introduction to Kubernetes

Lab Environment

This Lab will start with the following AWS resources provisioned automatically for you:

• 1 x EKS cluster - Cluster-1 - provides a fully functional Kubernetes cluster 
  • 1 x NodeGroup
    • 1 x EC2 Worker Nodes
• 2 x EC2 instances
  • eks.launch.instance - used to launch the EKS cluster (not accessible)
  • cloudacademylabs - used to provide SSH access to administer the EKS cluster

Updates

Febraury 12th, 2026 - Updated Kubernetes version

October 11th, 2024 - Updated Kubernetes version

December 5th, 2023 - Updated Kubernetes version

March 6th, 2023 - Updated to K8s 1.24