Project Overview

For this project, I deployed the 2048 game on an Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) cluster. The app runs inside a pod within the cluster, and by default, it's only accessible from within the cluster using a ClusterIP service.

To make it accessible externally, I set up a Kubernetes Ingress Controller (I went with ALB/NGINX—you can use either depending on what you're going for). The ingress resource handles the routing logic (like which URL should go to which service), and the controller itself takes care of managing the load balancer under the hood.

This approach is way more cost-efficient and secure compared to exposing each service with its own LoadBalancer. Plus, it's super scalable if you want to add more apps later or route based on paths/subdomains.

Tools and Technologies Used

Here’s a quick rundown of the tools and tech I used to get the 2048 game up and running on EKS:

• kubectl – My go-to for interacting with the Kubernetes cluster. Pretty much used it for deploying and managing everything inside the cluster.
• eksctl – Super handy CLI tool for spinning up and managing EKS clusters. It made cluster setup a lot easier.
• AWS CLI – Needed this to interact with AWS services like EKS and IAM. Also helped with setting up credentials and roles.
• IAM – Used it to configure permissions and roles to keep access secure and make sure services could talk to each other properly.
• Helm – Installed the AWS Load Balancer Controller using Helm. It’s basically the package manager for Kubernetes and made things way smoother.
• ALB Ingress Controller – This was the core of handling external traffic. It automatically spun up an Application Load Balancer and handled routing to the app based on the ingress rules.

All these tools came together to make the whole deployment process smooth, automated, and secure.

Detailed Overview

1. Install & Set Up the Tools

Before jumping in, i installed these tools installed on my local machine:

• kubectl – This is the CLI tool that i will use to interact with my Kubernetes cluster.