My pull request for updating the official Elasticsearch/Fluentd/Kibana logging add-on for Kubernetes to version 5.5.1 of Elasticsearch and Kibana was recently approved and merged into the master branch! Users of the popular EFK/ELK stack can now enjoy the latest version with their Kubernetes clusters!

In my previous blog post I showed how to use the Kops tool to create a production ready Kubernetes cluster on Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this follow-up post I will show how to install Elasticsearch and its graphical counterpart Kibana in the cluster, in order to be able to collect and store logs from your cluster and search/read them. We will also install Fluentd as this component is responsible for transmitting the standard Kubernetes logs to Elasticsearch.

Today I will be talking about Kops, which is an official tool for creating Kubernetes clusters on AWS, with support for GCE and VMware vSphere in alpha. It takes a whole lot of the pain out of setting up a Kubernetes cluster yourself, but still presents many challenges to overcome and a great degree of freedom in how you configure the cluster. I have recently created a Kubernetes cluster on AWS for a client, where I used the Kops tool for the very first time and I will here present what I learnt about implementing best practices with this technology stack.