EKS Production Container Platform
A multi-account Amazon EKS platform that teams consume as an internal developer platform, with Terraform provisioning, GitOps delivery, Vault secrets, and CIS-hardened clusters. It balances Kubernetes flexibility against the operational cost of running it well.
Overview
This architecture provides a production-ready Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) platform that application teams consume as an internal developer platform. Use it when many teams need a consistent, compliant place to run containers without each one rebuilding cluster plumbing. It standardizes networking, ingress, secrets, observability, and delivery so teams focus on their services.
Infrastructure is defined in Terraform across separate AWS accounts for non-production and production, following landing-zone guidance for blast-radius isolation.
Components
- EKS: Managed Kubernetes control plane with managed node groups and optional Fargate profiles for serverless pods.
- ALB: Application Load Balancer fronted by the AWS Load Balancer Controller for ingress.
- RDS: Managed PostgreSQL for stateful services, with Multi-AZ failover.
- ElastiCache: Managed Redis for caching and session state.
- Argo CD: GitOps controller that reconciles cluster state from Git.
- Prometheus and Grafana: Metrics, dashboards, and alerting.
- Vault: Centralized secrets with dynamic database credentials.
- Terraform: Declarative provisioning of accounts, VPCs, and the cluster.
Data Flow
User traffic resolves through Route 53 to an ALB, which routes to ingress controllers inside EKS. Services call RDS for durable state and ElastiCache for fast reads. Pods fetch short-lived database credentials from Vault using their Kubernetes service-account identity. Application changes flow through a CI pipeline that builds and signs images, pushes them to a registry, and updates a Git manifest; Argo CD then rolls the change into the cluster.
Scaling and Resilience
Managed node groups span three availability zones; the Cluster Autoscaler adds nodes as pending pods appear, and the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler scales replicas on load. RDS Multi-AZ provides automatic failover, and ElastiCache replication groups tolerate node loss. Pod disruption budgets protect availability during rolling upgrades. Blue-green or canary rollouts via Argo Rollouts limit the impact of bad releases.
Security
The cluster follows CIS Kubernetes Benchmark controls and Pod Security Standards. IAM Roles for Service Accounts grant each workload least-privilege access to AWS APIs without shared node credentials. Private subnets host nodes; the control-plane endpoint is restricted. Network policies segment namespaces, and container images are scanned and signed before deployment. Secrets never live in plain manifests.
Trade-offs and Alternatives
EKS gives you Kubernetes portability and a rich ecosystem, but it carries real operational cost: you own upgrades, add-on lifecycle, and capacity tuning. Teams that want less operational burden can use ECS with Fargate, trading ecosystem breadth for simplicity. Fully serverless options such as App Runner suit small workloads but limit control. If multi-cloud portability is a hard requirement, the Kubernetes choice pays off; if you are firmly on AWS and value managed simplicity, ECS Fargate may be the better fit. This platform is justified when you operate many services at scale and need consistency and governance.