Launch your first cluster

A cluster needs two things before it can be created: a team that owns it and a cloud credential for the account it runs in. This walkthrough sets up both and starts the cluster.

Before you start: you need an active billing plan with room for another cluster, and an AWS IAM user whose access key can create and manage EKS clusters. See Cloud credentials.

1. Create a team

1. Open Teams and click New Team.
2. Enter a name, for example Platform, and click Create team.

You are the team's owner and its first Admin. You can invite people later. See Teams and access.

2. Add a cloud credential

1. Open Credentials and click New Credential.
2. Choose AWS, give the credential a name, and paste the access key ID and secret access key.
3. Click Add credential.

The keys are checked with AWS before they are saved. If AWS rejects them, nothing is saved and you see an error.

3. Create the cluster

1. Open Clusters and click New Cluster.
2. Enter a name, then pick the team and the credential you just created.
3. Pick a region. The list fills in once a credential is selected.
4. Leave Availability zones and VPC CIDR empty unless you need them. See Create a cluster.
5. Click Create cluster.

4. Wait for it to come up

The cluster card appears with the status Creating. Provisioning takes about 40 minutes: first the Kubernetes control plane and its first node group, then the platform services (CI/CD, Git, registry, monitoring and certificates).

• Click the status badge to follow the provisioning log.
• The card changes to Running by itself when it is done, and the team members receive an email.

5. Open the cluster

Click the cluster's name. The Overview tab lists its load balancer and API endpoints, and the URL, user name and password for each platform service. From here you can:

• create a project for your application,
• set up the pipeline that builds and deploys it on every git push,
• expose it on a domain with HTTPS.