Launching self-managed Bottlerocket nodes with eksctl

Bottlerocket is gaining momentum as a secure platform for running container workloads. One of the key benefits is that it runs two operating system partitions, which means that it is simpler to upgrade with minimal downtime. This is discussed in more detail in Chapter 10, Upgrading EKS Clusters.

So far, we have created a managed node using the AWS CLI, the console, and a pre-made CloudFormation template. eksctl is a tool jointly developed by Weaveworks and AWS and will generate and deploy CloudFormation stacks based on a configuration file or CLI options. You can install it using the following URL: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/eksctl.html.

Prior to version 0.40.0 of eksctl, you could only modify clusters that had been created using eksctl. However, later versions allow a subset of operations on clusters not created by eksctl—this includes adding node groups.

We are going to use an existing cluster...