For performing this recipe, you'll need a Kubernetes cluster deployed by kops in AWS. You will need to follow the previous recipes in this chapter to launch a cluster. Here, we'll use the same cluster we created in the previous recipe:

# kops validate cluster
Using cluster from kubectl context: k8s-cookbook.net
Validating cluster k8s-cookbook.net
INSTANCE GROUPS
NAME                  ROLE   MACHINETYPE   MIN    MAX    SUBNETS
master-us-east-1a     Master t2.small      1      1      us-east-1a
nodes                 Node   t2.micro      2      2      us-east-1a,us-east-1b,us-east-1c
NODE STATUS
NAME                         ROLE   READY
ip-172-20-44-140.ec2.internal       node   True
ip-172-20-62-204.ec2.internal       master True
ip-172-20-87-38.ec2.internal node   True
Your cluster k8s-cookbook.net is ready

In the previous recipe, we've had the KOPS_STATE_STORE environment variable set as one of our S3 bucket names by the format s3://<bucket_name> to store the kops configuration and metadata.