aws / aws/containers-roadmap

[EKS] [request]: Administration of clusters across multiple accounts

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Description

### Community Note

* Please vote on this issue by adding a 👍 [reaction](https://blog.github.com/2016-03-10-add-reactions-to-pull-requests-issues-and-comments/) to the original issue to help the community and maintainers prioritize this request
* Please do not leave "+1" or "me too" comments, they generate extra noise for issue followers and do not help prioritize the request
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**Tell us about your request**
Looking to start a discussion and get some feedback to help guide our strategy around helping customers administer clusters that span multiple accounts.

**Which service(s) is this request for?**
EKS

**Tell us about the problem you're trying to solve. What are you trying to do, and why is it hard?**
AWS encourages users to use multiple AWS accounts as a way to reduce blast radius and help organizations manage permissions.

Kubernetes provides its own mechanism for isolation of compute into namespaces.

How can we make it easier for EKS users to manage clusters across AWS accounts?

**Questions we have**

1. Do you use AWS organizations? If so, do you have a single or multiple top level AWS organizations?
1. Do you use organization units (OU)? Would a set of EKS clusters you want to look at in a single view span multiple OUs, or generally be part of a single OU?

2. What is your multi account strategy with EKS today?
1. Do dev teams have their own AWS accounts and central team manages clusters in those accounts?
2. Does central team provide a template for dev teams to create and manage their own clusters in dev team accounts?
3. Are clusters all created in central accounts, and devs get access to Kubernetes API in those accounts?
4. Something else?
3. Do you have a tagging strategy for your EKS clusters?
4. Open ended: What would be your ideal multi account setup, and what features could EKS build to help? #307 proposes worker nodes in separate account from control plane, but this is not on our radar. We still believe the cluster should live in the same account, and we can provide tooling to help manage and view clusters across accounts.

**Additional context**
We see two distinct problem areas to solve:

**Lifecycle management**
This includes creating and managing EKS clusters from a central account that live in different accounts. Note that AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) has a [feature](https://aws-controllers-k8s.github.io/community/docs/user-docs/cross-account-resource-management/) that addresses this requirement today.

**Visibility**
List all clusters across accounts in EKS console from a central account. An example question to answer here "_What clusters that I'm responsible for are running supported versions of Kubernetes?_"

Any other AWS services you've used that solve similar problems in an elegant way?

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by reviewing the two stated areas: lifecycle management and visibility across AWS accounts. Read the linked ACK cross-account resource management feature and issue #307, then compare them with the proposed central EKS console view and account-management workflows. The issue does not define a concrete implementation or acceptance criteria, so completion would require an agreed scope first.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
aws, kubernetes
Domain
cloud, infrastructure
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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