Installing the chart

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes 1.22+
• Helm 3.0+
• An AWS account with the IAM permissions required by the controller (via IRSA or attached to the worker node role)

Installation steps

All examples in this guide use the public chart and images. If you've mirrored the repository for your own use (for example, to your Docker Hub namespace), update your commands to reference the mirrored chart instead of the public one.

For example:

• Public chart: dhi.io/<repository>:<tag>
• Mirrored chart: <your-namespace>/dhi-<repository>:<tag>

For more details about customizing the chart to reference other images, see the documentation⁠.

Step 1: Optional. Mirror the Helm chart and/or its images to your own registry

To optionally mirror a chart to your own third-party registry, you can follow the instructions in How to mirror an image⁠ for either the chart, the image, or both.

The same regctl tool that is used for mirroring container images can also be used for mirroring Helm charts, as Helm charts are OCI artifacts.

For example:

 regctl image copy \
     "${SRC_CHART_REPO}:${TAG}" \
     "${DEST_REG}/${DEST_CHART_REPO}:${TAG}" \
     --referrers \
     --referrers-src "${SRC_ATT_REPO}" \
     --referrers-tgt "${DEST_REG}/${DEST_CHART_REPO}" \
     --force-recursive

Step 2: Create a Kubernetes secret for pulling images

The Docker Hardened Images that the chart uses require authentication. To allow your Kubernetes cluster to pull those images, you need to create a Kubernetes secret with your Docker Hub credentials or with the credentials for your own registry.

Follow the authentication instructions for DHI in Kubernetes⁠.

For example:

kubectl create secret docker-registry helm-pull-secret \
  --docker-server=dhi.io \
  --docker-username=<Docker username> \
  --docker-password=<Docker token> \
  --docker-email=<Docker email>

Step 3: Set up IAM permissions

The controller needs AWS IAM permissions to manage ALBs, NLBs, and related resources. The recommended approach is IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA):

eksctl utils associate-iam-oidc-provider \
    --region <aws-region> \
    --cluster <your-cluster-name> \
    --approve

curl -o iam-policy.json https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes-sigs/aws-load-balancer-controller/main/docs/install/iam_policy.json

aws iam create-policy \
    --policy-name AWSLoadBalancerControllerIAMPolicy \
    --policy-document file://iam-policy.json

eksctl create iamserviceaccount \
    --cluster=<your-cluster-name> \
    --namespace=kube-system \
    --name=aws-load-balancer-controller \
    --attach-policy-arn=arn:aws:iam::<AWS_ACCOUNT_ID>:policy/AWSLoadBalancerControllerIAMPolicy \
    --approve

If you are not using IRSA, attach the same policy to your worker node IAM role instead, and set serviceAccount.create=false with serviceAccount.name=aws-load-balancer-controller at install time.

Step 4: Install the Helm chart

To install the chart, use helm install. Make sure you use helm login to log in before running helm install. Optionally, you can also use the --dry-run flag to test the installation without actually installing anything.

Note: The chart ships with a placeholder clusterName; always override it with your actual cluster name.

helm install my-aws-load-balancer-controller oci://dhi.io/aws-load-balancer-controller-chart --version <version> \
  --set "imagePullSecrets[0].name=helm-pull-secret" \
  --set "clusterName=<your-cluster-name>" \
  --namespace kube-system

If you created the IAM role with eksctl create iamserviceaccount in the previous step, also set serviceAccount.create=false and serviceAccount.name=aws-load-balancer-controller so the chart reuses that service account instead of creating a new one without the IRSA annotation:

helm install my-aws-load-balancer-controller oci://dhi.io/aws-load-balancer-controller-chart --version <version> \
  --set "imagePullSecrets[0].name=helm-pull-secret" \
  --set "clusterName=<your-cluster-name>" \
  --set "serviceAccount.create=false" \
  --set "serviceAccount.name=aws-load-balancer-controller" \
  --namespace kube-system

Replace <version> accordingly. If the chart is in your own registry or repository, replace dhi.io with your own registry and namespace. Replace helm-pull-secret with the name of the image pull secret you created earlier.

Step 5: Verify the installation

The deployment's pods should show up and running almost immediately:

$ kubectl get pods -n kube-system
NAME                                                                    READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
my-aws-load-balancer-controller-aws-load-balancer-controller-chart-...  1/1     Running   0          20s

Step 6: Create an Ingress or a Service of type LoadBalancer

Once the controller is running, it provisions an ALB for Ingress resources annotated with kubernetes.io/ingress.class: alb (or using the albIngressClass), and an NLB for Service resources of type LoadBalancer. See the upstream documentation⁠ for the full set of supported annotations.