Using the Cloud Platform service pod

The Cloud Platform team provide a “service pod” module to help users run maintenance tasks against namespace resources using the AWS CLI.

You need to have complete step 1 (configuring IRSA) in Accessing AWS APIs and resources from your namespace to use the service pod module.

Once you’ve done that, you can create and use a the service pod by completing the following three steps:

Raise and merge a PR that configures cloud-platform-terraform-service-pod in your namespace:

# irsa configuration is required to use the service pod
module "irsa" {
  ...
}

# set up the service pod
module "service_pod" {
  source = "github.com/ministryofjustice/cloud-platform-terraform-service-pod?ref=1.0.0" # use the latest release

  # Configuration
  namespace            = var.namespace
  service_account_name = module.irsa.service_account.name # this uses the service account name from the irsa module
}

As soon as this PR is merged, a service pod will be created for you to use.

Get your namespace pods

You will need the name of your service pod to exec into it. You can get the name of the pod by running the following:

$ kubectl get pods -n $namespace

NAME                                                           READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
cloud-platform-6c6eb7ed1fd678e4-service-pod-598dcf5c57-sm7mb   1/1     Running   0          10m
# ^ this one!

The pod name you need is the one with “service-pod” in it.

exec into the container and check AWS CLI works

Once you have the service pod’s name, you can run the following command in your Terminal to exec into the container:
```
$ kubectl exec -n $namespace --stdin --tty $pod_name -- /bin/sh
```
Once you’re into the container, run the following and check the output to check the AWS CLI works:
```
$ aws sts get-caller-identity

{
  "UserId": "AROAEXAMPLE:botocore-session-00000000",
  "Account": "000000000000",
  "Arn": "arn:aws:sts::000000000000:assumed-role/..."
}
```
You can then run AWS CLI commands against AWS resources.

This page was last reviewed on 11 July 2023. It needs to be reviewed again on 11 October 2023 by the page owner #cloud-platform .

This page was set to be reviewed before 11 October 2023 by the page owner #cloud-platform. This might mean the content is out of date.