1. I came up with a way of configuring k8s to use aws logs without any 3rd party service/application. All you have to do is to add the following lines in your master.yaml file:

spec:
  additionalPolicies:
    master: |
      [
        {
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Action": ["logs:CreateLogGroup", "logs:CreateLogStream", "logs:PutLogEvents"],
          "Resource": ["*"]
        }
      ]
    node: |
      [
        {
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Action": ["logs:CreateLogGroup", "logs:CreateLogStream", "logs:PutLogEvents"],
          "Resource": ["*"]
        }
      ]
  docker:
    logDriver: awslogs
    logOpt:
    - awslogs-region=eu-west-1
    - awslogs-group=<group-name> # make sure that this group already exist (create it manually)
    - tag={{.Name}}

2. The last line is the most important one, and it will rename the log-stream for each pod to something readable instead of the docker hash.

3. goes without saying that you have to update the cluster in order for the changes to take affect. (kops update cluster ${CLUSTER-NAME} --yes)

4. That's it. Open AWS Cloudwatch and enjoy your logs :-)

5. With that said, I have one problem. The log stream name contains much more info than what I would have wanted. Any idea how to trim the log stream name into simply the pod nice name?

6. I have tried several ways of manipulating the 'tag' value (e.g. tag={{ with split .Name "_" }}{{ index . 2 }}{{end}} ), but it has failed the update operation.

7. logstream name example: k8s_POD-NICE-NAME_POD-NICE-NAME-67c77758bf-8knn8_mind_24ed4160-5b5e-11e9-b53a-0a02b6d80d7c_1