I'm (probably) the primary maintainer of kube-up on AWS. kube-up does a lot of tedious AWS configuration that I/we haven't documented. But there's really no magic involved; it is standard AWS, except for the fact that we use VPC alternative routing to assign each node a private /24 CIDR. There's a lot of tagging of resources as well, primarily so that we can find them later to delete them as part of kube-down, but also to support multiple kubernetes clusters in a single VPC.

Now that we are post-v1 I'm certainly hoping to replace kube-up with something more readable and maintainable (or at least start replacing it). Hopefully we'll find something which better promotes reuse between the different clouds, and hopefully we can document it a bit better as well. The split between kube-up and Salt is also not exactly elegant.

If there are any particular questions you have about how the magic happens, I'd be happy to try to answer them (or feel free to file issues and tag me on github); this will help me make the docs better.