Prepare Your VM

At the end of this guide, you will have a node ready to install Edera.

Get your license

Create an account at on.edera.dev if you don’t have one
Log in and click Create License
Click Show to reveal your license key

Your license key is used during installation to authenticate to the Edera registry.

⚠️

One license key can only be active on one machine at a time. Deactivate your node from the dashboard before reusing a license on a different machine.

System requirements

RAM

4 GB minimum

Disk

30 GB minimum

Virtualization

Hardware virt. enabled

Boot mode

UEFI required

Container runtime

Docker (or Podman on CentOS/RHEL)

No UEFI required — any EC2 instance type with hardware virtualization works (t3, m5, m6i, and more).

UEFI boot mode is required. Use a UEFI-capable AMI on EC2 (m5, c5, m6i instance types). Default Ubuntu (24.04 and above) and Amazon Linux (AL2023) AMIs boot UEFI.

Launch an EC2 instance

Use a setup script to provision an EC2 instance. You can view the full usage details in the edera-dev/learn repository.

ℹ️

Before running the script, make sure you’re authenticated with AWS. Run aws configure (or aws login for SSO) if you haven’t already.

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/edera-dev/learn/refs/heads/main/getting-started/edera-on-installer/scripts/ec2-setup.sh)"

Prerequisites

AWS CLI installed and configured
An SSH key pair in your target region

If you don’t have a key pair:

export KEY_FILE=edera-key.pem
aws ec2 create-key-pair --key-name edera-key --query 'KeyMaterial' --output text > $KEY_FILE
chmod 400 $KEY_FILE

ℹ️

If you haven’t configured the AWS CLI yet, run aws configure (or aws login for SSO) before proceeding.

Get your key name

export KEY_NAME=$(aws ec2 describe-key-pairs \
  --query 'KeyPairs[0].KeyName' --output text)

Get your subnet ID

export SUBNET_ID=$(aws ec2 describe-subnets \
  --query 'Subnets[0].SubnetId' --output text)

Set up a security group

export SG_ID=$(aws ec2 create-security-group \
  --group-name ederaon-sg \
  --description "EderaON evaluation" \
  --query 'GroupId' --output text)

aws ec2 authorize-security-group-ingress \
  --group-id $SG_ID \
  --protocol tcp \
  --port 22 \
  --cidr $(curl -s https://checkip.amazonaws.com)/32

Launch the instance

aws ec2 run-instances \
  --image-id ami-0d76b909de1a0595d \
  --instance-type m5.large \
  --key-name $KEY_NAME \
  --block-device-mappings "[{\"DeviceName\":\"${ROOT_DEVICE}\",\"Ebs\":{\"VolumeSize\":30,\"VolumeType\":\"gp3\"}}]" \
  --security-group-ids $SG_ID \
  --subnet-id $SUBNET_ID \
  --associate-public-ip-address \
  --tag-specifications 'ResourceType=instance,Tags=[{Key=Name,Value=ederaon-test}]'

ℹ️

The AMI ID above is for us-west-2. Find the latest Ubuntu AMI for your region on Ubuntu Cloud Images.

Connect to your instance

export INSTANCE_IP=$(aws ec2 describe-instances \
  --filters "Name=tag:Name,Values=ederaon-test" \
  --query 'Reservations[*].Instances[*].PublicIpAddress' \
  --output text)

ssh -i $KEY_FILE ubuntu@$INSTANCE_IP

Install dependencies

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y docker.io nftables
sudo systemctl start docker
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

Start a new SSH session after running this command. The group change only takes effect in new sessions.

Preparing for Kubernetes (optional)

Only needed if you plan to use our Kubernetes bootstrap script in the Run Edera step. If you’re bringing your own Kubernetes cluster (EKS, kubeadm, etc.), skip this — you can configure Edera as the CRI on your existing nodes directly.

Show Kubernetes preparation steps

These steps install Kubernetes 1.36, Helm, and configure networking prerequisites on Ubuntu.

⚠️

Run these steps before installing Edera. After Edera is installed, you will configure Kubernetes to use the Edera CRI in the Run Edera step.

Install Kubernetes

sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl gpg
sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://pkgs.k8s.io/core:/stable:/v1.36/deb/Release.key \
  | sudo gpg --batch --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/kubernetes-apt-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/kubernetes-apt-keyring.gpg] https://pkgs.k8s.io/core:/stable:/v1.36/deb/ /" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kubernetes.list
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y kubelet kubeadm kubectl
sudo apt-mark hold kubelet kubeadm kubectl
sudo systemctl enable --now kubelet

Install Helm

sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl gpg
sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://packages.buildkite.com/helm-linux/helm-debian/gpgkey \
  | sudo gpg --batch --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/helm-apt-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/helm-apt-keyring.gpg] https://packages.buildkite.com/helm-linux/helm-debian/any/ any main" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/helm-stable-debian.list
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y helm

Configure networking prerequisites

Enable IPv4 forwarding and the processing by iptables of packets traversing a bridge:

echo br_netfilter | sudo tee -a /etc/modules-load.d/99-containerd.conf
sudo systemctl restart systemd-modules-load.service
echo 'net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1' | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.d/99-kubernetes.conf
echo 'net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables = 1' | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.d/99-kubernetes.conf
sudo systemctl restart systemd-sysctl.service

After running these steps, continue to Install Edera. You will bootstrap the cluster in the Run Edera step.

Next: Install Edera →

Last updated on 2026-06-10