Better support for different AWS regions and AZs for our Kubernetes reference solution

We’ve made several improvements to our Kubernetes stacks, allowing us to deploy in different AWS Regions (eg. us-east-1) and allowing more dynamic usage of the Availability Zones in those regions.

Before we were moslty focussed on the eu-west-1 region, since that’s also where our customers mostly situated. However the need to deploy in other Regions arised, triggering the following changes:

  • Publish our AMIs in the us-east-1 and eu-central-1 Regions, next to eu-west-1. More Regions can easily be added on a per-need basis via our automated pipelines.
  • Updated our automation code and pipelines to support different Regions.
  • We now create dedicated subnets for running EKS nodes, instead of using the default private_app subnets generated by our VPC module.
  • Allow specifying which (and how much) Availability Zones to use for the EKS node groups. For example this allows excluding AZs with limited capacity, or using a specific AZ only for a node group.