Windows Self Managed Nodes fail to join a cluster

Question

I created a node-group of self managed nodes with terraform, the ec2 instanced get created with the right tags, security group & settings, the aws-auth config map includes this SG for the rols "system:bootstrappers" & "system:nodes, the amazon-vpc-cni config map includes the "enable-windows-ipam" setting and yet the nodes don't show up in the cluster nodes.
Anyone has any ideas what can be wrong?

Answer

- Check the following link to verify the Windows AMI version compatible with EKS Cluster
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/eks-optimized-windows-ami.html
- Double-check the aws-auth ConfigMap in your EKS cluster to ensure that it includes the correct roles for your Windows nodes. 
You can use the kubectl get configmap aws-auth -n kube-system -o yaml command to inspect the ConfigMap.
- Review the Amazon VPC CNI ConfigMap to ensure that it has the correct "enable-windows-ipam" setting. 
You can use the kubectl get configmap aws-node -n kube-system -o yaml command to inspect the ConfigMap
-

Answer

Please see the documentation provided here https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/launch-windows-workers.html for launching self-managed Windows nodegroups. Note - you will need some Linux based nodes for core addons such as CoreDNS which are required for the cluster

Windows Self Managed Nodes fail to join a cluster

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