Advanced cluster settings

Enable ECR scanning, GuardDuty, private clusters, KMS encryption, and custom networking options for your AWS and GCP Porter clusters

Porter exposes advanced cluster configuration options for customers with specific compliance, security, or networking requirements. These settings are available on the Advanced tab of your cluster settings for AWS and GCP clusters.

AWS

Networking

Private cluster

When Private cluster is enabled, Porter provisions the EKS cluster with both public and private API server endpoint access, and restricts the public endpoint to an IP allowlist containing Porter’s control-plane IPs plus any customer CIDRs you add. This configuration is SOC2 / HIPAA compliant.

Setting	Description
Private cluster	Restricts the EKS API server’s public endpoint to an IP allowlist (Porter’s IPs plus any customer-supplied CIDRs). The private endpoint inside your VPC remains reachable from VPC-attached resources.
CIDR allowlist	Additional CIDR ranges (beyond Porter’s required IPs) that may reach the public endpoint.

Porter intentionally does not enable EKS “private-only” endpoint mode. Private-only forces every control-plane call — including Porter’s — through a VPN or VPC-peered path, which adds operational complexity and has historically caused outages for customers. Public + private with a tight IP allowlist meets the same compliance requirements and is significantly more reliable.

The Tailscale integration is a separate layer that carries traffic for porter kubectl and porter helm commands; it does not control how the EKS API server endpoint itself is exposed.

Load balancer

Configure the type of load balancer used for your cluster’s ingress. Changing this setting causes downtime while the load balancer is recreated.

Type	Description
NLB	Network Load Balancer — operates at Layer 4, routes TCP/UDP traffic, and provides ultra-low latency and high throughput.
ALB	Application Load Balancer — operates at Layer 7, routes HTTP/HTTPS traffic, and supports wildcard domains, ACM certificates, and WAFv2.

When ALB is selected, the following additional settings become available. See Custom domains with ALB for end-to-end setup instructions.

Setting	Description
Wildcard domains	Domains to issue ACM certificates for. Do not include the *. prefix — Porter creates a SAN for *.<domain> automatically. Comma-separate multiple domains.
IP allow list	Comma-separated list of CIDR ranges (e.g. 160.72.72.58/32,160.72.72.59/32) permitted to reach the ALB.
Certificate ARNs	Existing ACM certificate ARNs to attach to the ALB.
AWS tags	Key/value tags applied to the ALB and related AWS resources.
WAFv2 enabled	Attaches a Regional WAFv2 web ACL to the ALB.
WAFv2 ARN	ARN of the Regional WAFv2 web ACL to attach. Only Regional WAFv2 is supported.

Private load balancer

In addition to the default public cluster load balancer, you can provision an internal load balancer that only accepts traffic from inside your VPC (or networks peered to it). Use this when you want to expose services to internal clients — for example, an internal admin tool, a service consumed only by other VPCs, or a workload that must not be reachable from the public internet.

Setting	Description
Add private load balancer	Provisions a private NLB alongside the existing public cluster load balancer. Only NLB private load balancers are supported.

Once enabled, you must configure a DNS provider so Porter can issue and renew TLS certificates for ingress hostnames attached to the private load balancer over ACME DNS-01. HTTP-01 challenges cannot reach a private load balancer, so DNS-01 is required.

Porter supports two DNS providers for private load balancer ingress: Cloudflare and AWS Route53.

We recommend serving private ingress from a standalone zone dedicated to internal traffic (for example, internal.example.com) rather than reusing a zone that also serves production domains. A dedicated zone avoids record conflicts with existing production DNS, and it keeps DNS access scoped to internal hostnames only, which limits the blast radius away from your production domains.

Cloudflare

Setting	Description
DNS credentials	API token for Cloudflare. The token must have permission to create and delete TXT records on the zones used by your private ingress hostnames.

Save the credentials before updating the cluster. You can rotate the token later with Edit credentials, or remove the integration entirely with Remove. Removing credentials stops certificate issuance and renewal for private load balancer ingress.

Route53

When the cluster is on AWS, you can use Route53 instead of Cloudflare. Porter authenticates to Route53 through an EKS Pod Identity scoped to a single hosted zone, so no API tokens are stored.

Setting	Description
Route53 domain	The DNS zone the private ingress serves certificates for (for example, internal.example.com). At install time, Porter resolves the matching public Route53 hosted zone in the same AWS account and provisions a cert-manager pod identity scoped to that zone.

The domain must already exist as a public hosted zone in the cluster’s AWS account, and the zone name must match the domain exactly. If only a parent zone is present (for example, example.com for a domain of internal.example.com), Porter cannot issue certificates for it, and the domain requires its own dedicated hosted zone.

Observability

CloudWatch control plane logs

Configure which EKS cluster control plane log types are sent to AWS CloudWatch. These logs help with debugging, auditing, and monitoring your cluster’s control plane components.

Log Type	Description
API Server logs	Logs from the Kubernetes API server, useful for debugging API requests
Audit logs	Records of individual users, administrators, or system components that have affected the cluster
Authenticator logs	Logs from the AWS IAM authenticator, useful for debugging authentication issues
Controller manager logs	Logs from the controller manager, which manages core control loops
Scheduler logs	Logs from the scheduler, useful for debugging pod scheduling decisions

CloudWatch Observability agent

You may also enable the CloudWatch Observability agent as an EKS add-on for enhanced cluster monitoring.

Setting	Description
AWS CloudWatch Observability agent installed on cluster	Enables the CloudWatch Observability add-on for metrics and logs collection

Security

ECR scanning

Enable Amazon ECR image scanning to automatically scan container images for software vulnerabilities.

Setting	Description
ECR scanning enabled	When enabled, images pushed to ECR are automatically scanned for vulnerabilities

AWS GuardDuty

AWS GuardDuty provides intelligent threat detection for your EKS cluster, monitoring for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior.

When enabling GuardDuty, you must also configure the following in your AWS Console:

1. Enable EKS Protection in the EKS Protection tab of the GuardDuty console
2. Enable Runtime Monitoring

For automated agent configuration, enable both:

• EKS agent auto-configuration
• EC2 agent auto-configuration

Setting	Description
AWS GuardDuty agent installed on cluster	Installs the GuardDuty security agent on your cluster nodes

KMS encryption

Enable AWS Key Management Service (KMS) encryption for Kubernetes secrets stored in etcd.

Setting	Description
KMS encryption enabled	Encrypts Kubernetes secrets at rest using a customer-managed KMS key

GCP

Advanced Networking Config

Modifying these advanced network settings can impact cluster connectivity and performance. Ensure you understand the implications before making changes.

Setting	Description	Default
Egress NAT IPs Count	Number of egress NAT IPs. Cannot be decreased once set.	1
Min Ports per VM	Configures the minimum number of ports allocated per VM for GKE	64
Enable Endpoint Independent Mapping	Recommended for most use cases. Affects Cloud NAT behavior.	Enabled
Enable Dynamic Port Allocation	Allows GKE to dynamically allocate more ports to VMs that need them	Disabled

Observability Settings

Configure observability features for the GKE cluster control plane.

Setting	Description
Enable Control Plane Logging	Enable the collection of logs from the Kubernetes control plane components (e.g., API server, scheduler)
Enable Control Plane Metrics	Enable the collection of metrics from the Kubernetes control plane components