Crib Notes: Accessing EKS Cluster with `kubectl`

While AWS does provide a CLI tool – eksctl –for talking to EKS resources, it's not suitable for all Kubernetes actions one might wish to engage in. Instead, one must use the more-generic access provided through the more-broadly used tool, kubectl. Both tools will generally be needed, however.

If, like me, your AWS resources are only reachable through IAM roles – rather than IAM user credentials – it will be necessary to use the AWS CLI tool's eks update-kubeconfig subcommand. The general setup workflow will look like:

1. Set up your profile definition(s)
2. Use the AWS CLI's sso login to authenticate your CLI into AWS (e.g., `aws sso login --no-browser`)
3. Verify that you've successfully logged in to your target IAM role (e.g., `aws sts get-caller-identity` …or any AWS command, really)
4. Use the AWS CLI to update your ~/.kube/config file with the `eks update-kubeconfig` subcommand (e.g., `aws eks update-kubeconfig --name thjones2-test-01`)
5. Validate that you're able to execute kubectl commands and get back the kind of data that you expect to get (e.g., `kubectl get pods --all-namespaces` to get a list of all running pods in all namespaces within the target EKS cluster)