[Bug]: EKS Workshop not working on AWS Free Accounts (new Free Tier)

[marco-nastasi]

Installation method

Own AWS account

What happened?

By default the Cloudformation template creates a EC2 instance of type t3.medium where the development environment runs. This type of instance is not supported in the new AWS Free Accounts. In us-west-2 and eu-west-1 these are the supported EC2 instance types:

aws ec2 describe-instance-types \
     --filters Name=free-tier-eligible,Values=true \
     --query "InstanceTypes[*].[InstanceType]" \
     --output text | sort

c7i-flex.large
m7i-flex.large
t3.micro
t3.small
t4g.micro
t4g.small

The Cloudformation stack allways rolls back and the development environment can't be deployed.

What did you expect to happen?

The EC2 instance type of the Cloudformation template should be selectable from a list of instances, so people using free accounts can use the Workshop too.

How can we reproduce it?

Try to run the Cloudformation templates on a AWS Free Account.

Anything else we need to know?

No response

EKS version

N/A

[Charlesfox1]

+1 would like to see this fixed

[niallthomson]

Thanks for the request! I agree this would be great to have.

This will require us to do analysis of the impact on a few different modules. For example the autoscaling labs are written with the assumption of the instance types we currently use, and using a different instance type would probably require these to be re-written.

We'd also need to consider if some specific labs may just not work, for example we have some modules that use RDS, Inferentia compute instances, Opensearch and so on. We'd need to validate all these to make sure they work, and some may just need to be marked as ineligible for free tier.

[Ukashatu40]

Yes please, especially for the newbies like us, I have actually been trying to start the

AWS 101 Workshop - Containers

unfortunately i am using new AWS Free Account, hence could not make it pass setup stage.

What am i supposed to do now