AWS KinD¶

Provisions an EC2 instance running KinD (Kubernetes in Docker) with the Datadog Agent deployed via Helm. A lighter-weight alternative to EKS when you need a Kubernetes environment but don't need a managed cluster.

Prerequisites¶

KinD requires both an API key and an app key in ~/.test_infra_config.yaml (or via E2E_APP_KEY).

Create¶

dda inv aws.create-kind

Key options¶

Flag	Default	Description
`--stack-name`	`aws-kind`	Suffix for the Pulumi stack name
`--architecture`	`x86_64`	CPU architecture: `x86_64` or `arm64`
`--agent-version`	latest	Container image tag
`--full-image-path`	—	Full registry path to a custom agent image
`--cluster-agent-full-image-path`	—	Full registry path to a custom Cluster Agent image
`--install-agent-with-operator`	`false`	Deploy the agent via the Datadog Operator instead of Helm
`--helm-config`	—	Path to a custom Helm values file to merge with defaults
`--kube-version`	latest	Kubernetes version (e.g. `1.31`)
`--use-fakeintake`	`false`	Deploy a local mock intake alongside the agent
`--agent-flavor`	—	Agent flavor (e.g. `datadog-fips-agent`)

Examples¶

# KinD cluster on an ARM host
dda inv aws.create-kind --architecture=arm64

# KinD with a specific Kubernetes version
dda inv aws.create-kind --kube-version=1.31

# Deploy agent via Operator instead of Helm
dda inv aws.create-kind --install-agent-with-operator=true

Connect¶

SSH connection details for the EC2 host are printed after creation. Once connected, kubectl is available on the host and the KinD cluster context is already configured:

# From inside the EC2 host
kubectl get nodes
kubectl get pods -n datadog

Destroy¶

dda inv aws.destroy-kind

Limitations¶

Single-node cluster — not suitable for testing multi-node Kubernetes behavior.
The EC2 instance type is fixed at t3.xlarge; this cannot be overridden.