Support Macs with Apple Silicon and arm processors

[rothgar]

What would you like to be added:
Currently the bootstrap cluster and clusters using the docker provider cannot run on M1 Macs. It would be good to support these options for administrative machines and local clusters.

Why is this needed:
To allow more users to try EKS-A and manage clusters.

[neurostream]

Why our shop likes watching this issue...

• For local offline development workstations, we started to replace the container engine bundled with Docker Desktop and it's Docker.raw image from docker.com with containerd on Amazon Linux 2 KVM and it's QCOW2 images from amazonlinux.com.

  • For legacy amd64 workstations we use the amd64 image.
  • For new arm64 workstations we use the arm64 image

• This has strengthened the local to remote environment parity experienced by developers for basic container image development.

• However, if a developer is running a local k8s stack (say, minikube , k3s , etc. ) that is different from production/hosted environments, then there are still opportunities to further improve local-to-remote environment parity at the k8s level. So, the next stop on that road for us is standardizing Kubernetes layer as EKS for container orchestration (and not just within the AWS Cloud).

  • Our developers use Macs, and Apple Silicon/arm64 has already replaced Intel/amd64 Macs for local development workstations.
  • In order for local offline development to drive the transition of cloud/hosted compute from amd64 to arm64, we see EKS-A support for arm64 as key to success in that effort - using the Container provider (is that based on KIND?) instead of the VMWare OVA provider.
  • We considered starting off from the VMware angle, but, at the moment:
    • the roadmap and timeline with VMWare Fusion for Apple Silicon is not clear right now, still being a work-in-progress under VMWare's private beta for Fusion on new Macs.
    • EKS-A's VMWare provider is specifically cited for use with vSphere (and so not a solution for running EKS on Fusion/Workstation )
    • qemu-kvm linux instances running containerd is just generally popular with our developers, so we haven't really missed the vmware.com or docker.com footprint in our tool chains.

This is all with the pre-supposition that moving to aarch64/arm64 from amd64 for our remote/hosted EKS environments is a "good thing" - which, for our requirements, that is very much the case.

( #687 seems like some swell headway. )

[github-actions]

There has been no activity on this issue for 60 days. Labeling as stale and closing in 7 days if no further activity.

[Pablo-platypus]

any update on this? is it in the roadmap? any time estimates? any known workarounds?

[ycyr]

Any news on this issue?

[jaxesn]

We do a lot of internal development now on M1 based Macs as well. At this point I am not ready to call this done/fully supported, but things should generally work. All of our images, including the kind images which power the bootstrap clusters and docker based eks-a clusters, are built for arm64 as well as amd64. We do not currently have test suites for these, which is why I am hesitant to close and call this done, but if you try it out and have issues, we would be willing to check it out.

[rothgar]

Would it be ok to update the homebrew formula to install the correct binary on M1 Macs?

[github-actions]

There has been no activity on this issue for 60 days. Labeling as stale and closing in 7 days if no further activity.

[DaveInga]

Any update on this?

[soostdijck]

Curious what the status is here, my intel mac will be replaced in a couple of months. I would love a M1/2 option on brew.

[chrisdoherty4]

Hi all. EKS-A should work on M1 Macs; please try it out and let us know if you have any problems.

[RazaGR]

does it work on M2?

[chrisdoherty4]

does it work on M2?

Yes.

[RazaGR]

does it work on M2?

Yes.

when I installed using brew install aws/tap/eks-anywhere
I get this warning

==> Fetching aws/tap/eks-anywhere
==> Downloading https://anywhere-assets.eks.amazonaws.com/releases/eks-a/50/artifacts/eks-a/v0.18.0/darwin/amd64/eksctl-anywhere-v0.18.0-darwin-amd64.tar.gz
==> Installing eks-anywhere from aws/tap
==> Caveats
=====WARNING=====
ARM CPU's are not yet supported.
The amd64 binary has been installed but will not work.
Please uninstall this formula.

[chrisdoherty4]

@RazaGR There was a delay publishing the 0.18.1 brew formula, but the latest installs ARM binaries.

[RazaGR]

@chrisdoherty4 confirm it works with new formula, I have updated the docs to reflect this as that was confusing for me.
#7067

Thanks

[galvesribeiro]

Hey guys, I understand the binaries for the admin machine can be installed on Apple Silicon thru brew and assuming kubernetes is not available directly on MacOS, we can't use Macs as targets for "bare metal" deployment.

The question is: If we have VMware Fusion VMs on Macs with Apple Silicon, could we target them to install as "bare metal"? We have a particular scenario which would be good to run on Macs our workload.

Thanks!