AWS Provider

The AWS provider creates and manages managed Amazon EKS clusters via eksctl. It supports the full cluster lifecycle (create, delete, start, stop, list, info) and is the only provider available for the EKS distribution.

Prerequisites

AWS account — with permissions to create EKS clusters, IAM roles, EC2 instances, and VPCs
AWS credentials — configured via aws configure, environment variables, or an instance profile:
Terminal window
```
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=your-access-key
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=your-secret-key
export AWS_REGION=us-east-1
```
KSail defaults to reading the AWS region from AWS_REGION. If you also use other AWS tooling that expects AWS_DEFAULT_REGION, you may set both variables to the same value.
Docker — required locally for the ksail CLI

Configuration

ksail.yaml Reference

# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/devantler-tech/ksail/main/schemas/ksail-config.schema.json
apiVersion: ksail.io/v1alpha1
kind: Cluster
metadata:
  name: eks-default
spec:
  cluster:
    distribution: EKS
    provider: AWS

All cluster-specific metadata (region, version, nodegroups, addons) lives in eks.yaml — not in ksail.yaml. See the EKS distribution guide for the full eks.yaml configuration reference.

Characteristics

Property	Value
Supported distribution	EKS
Infrastructure type	Cloud (managed AWS)
Local registries	❌ Not supported
Local mirrors	❌ Not supported (use external URLs)
CNI	Amazon VPC CNI (provided by default)
CSI	Amazon EBS CSI Driver (provided by default)
LoadBalancer support	Built-in (AWS-managed)
AWS Load Balancer Controller	🚧 Optional / not installed by KSail

Limitations

Cloud provider — local Docker containers (mirrors, registries) are inaccessible from the cluster
Only one distribution is supported: EKS