AWS EKS consulting for production workloads.
Stand up Amazon EKS the way it should run in production: a clean landing zone, Karpenter autoscaling, GitOps delivery and a security baseline aligned to the CIS EKS benchmark. Whether you are launching your first cluster or fixing one that grew faster than its foundations, we deliver it as code your team owns.
Built for scale-ups and established engineering teams.
EKS pays off when you want managed Kubernetes on AWS without hand-building every control plane concern yourself, and without the sprawl that comes from wiring it up in a hurry. These are the situations where dedicated EKS help earns its keep, whether you are a fast-growing product company or an established business modernising on AWS.
Launching your first EKS cluster
You have chosen AWS and want EKS set up properly the first time: VPC and networking, IRSA, node strategy and add-ons as code, not click-ops.
Outgrowing ECS or plain EC2
ECS task definitions or a fleet of EC2 instances have hit their ceiling, and hiring for Kubernetes is easier than staffing bespoke orchestration.
Inheriting a messy cluster
An EKS cluster exists but drifted: unmanaged node groups, no autoscaling story, secrets in plain config and no clear ownership. It needs a reset.
Fighting the AWS bill
EKS spend is climbing faster than traffic. You want Karpenter, Spot and right-sizing before the next budget review, not after.
Preparing for AI and GPU workloads
Model serving and GPU scheduling are on the roadmap, and you need node pools and autoscaling on EKS ready before they land.
Facing a security review
A customer, auditor or board wants evidence the cluster is hardened. You need RBAC, IRSA, network policy and CIS EKS alignment in place.
A landing zone first, then workloads.
A cluster is only as good as the account and network it sits in. We start with the EKS landing zone: VPC design and the Amazon VPC CNI, IAM and IRSA for least-privilege workload identity, a deliberate choice between managed node groups and Fargate, and the control-plane and endpoint settings that keep it private and auditable. Only then do workloads move in, wave by wave, behind GitOps so every change is reviewed and reversible.
Principles we hold to on every EKS engagement.
- Workload identity uses IRSA, scoped per service, so pods never share a broad node role or long-lived keys.
- Everything is code in your repositories: Terraform or OpenTofu for the cluster, GitOps definitions for what runs on it, reviewed like any other change.
- Autoscaling is designed in, not retrofitted: Karpenter or Cluster Autoscaler for nodes, the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler for pods, and honest requests and limits underneath.
- Security follows the CIS EKS benchmark from the first namespace: RBAC, network policy, private endpoints and image scanning.
- Your engineers work alongside us, so the cluster is understood and operable, not a black box we hand over.
What an EKS engagement covers.
Landing zone & cluster
VPC and subnet design, VPC CNI, EKS control plane, private endpoints, IAM and IRSA, and a node strategy across managed node groups and Fargate.
Core add-ons
AWS Load Balancer Controller for ingress, EBS and EFS CSI drivers for storage, ExternalDNS for records, and metrics-server wired in as code.
Autoscaling
Karpenter or Cluster Autoscaler for nodes, Horizontal Pod Autoscaler for pods, and Spot-aware provisioning tuned to your traffic shape.
GitOps delivery
Argo CD or Flux, Helm or Kustomize, and CI wiring so deploys to EKS become boring, auditable and self-service.
Observability
CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana and OpenTelemetry for metrics, logs and traces, with SLOs and alerts before anything serves production.
Security & cost hardening
CIS EKS benchmark alignment, RBAC and network policy, image scanning, plus right-sizing and Spot for a bill that tracks demand.
EKS consulting is one path within our Kubernetes consulting practice, and often part of a broader AWS cloud transformation. Moving onto the cluster is a Kubernetes migration, and once it is live teams tighten spend with Kubernetes cost optimization.
Our EKS consulting process.
Four phases, planned backwards from a cluster you can run yourself. The architecture review confirms exact scope and timeline before anything is provisioned.
Assess
Account, network, workloads and constraints reviewed, ending in a concrete landing-zone and node strategy for your estate.
Build the foundation
VPC, EKS control plane, IRSA, add-ons and autoscaling stood up as Terraform or OpenTofu, with GitOps wired in.
Migrate & cut over
Workloads move from ECS, EC2 or an old cluster in waves, blue-green or canary, each with a tested rollback.
Operate & own
Handover with runbooks, observability and hardening, or an agreed managed operating model. Everything lives in your repositories.
The tools we actually use on EKS.
No reseller agreements and no partner quota. Recommendations follow your workloads. Typical building blocks on an EKS engagement:
Cluster & identity
Amazon EKS with the VPC CNI, IRSA for workload identity, managed node groups and Fargate profiles chosen per workload.
Infrastructure as code
Terraform or OpenTofu for the account, VPC, cluster and add-ons, with modular, reviewed, version-controlled definitions.
Add-ons
AWS Load Balancer Controller, EBS and EFS CSI drivers, ExternalDNS and cert management, installed and versioned as code.
Autoscaling
Karpenter for fast, Spot-aware node provisioning, Cluster Autoscaler where preferred, and the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler for pods.
GitOps & observability
Argo CD or Flux for delivery, and CloudWatch with Prometheus, Grafana and OpenTelemetry for metrics, logs and traces.
Security & cost
CIS EKS benchmark hardening, RBAC, network policy and image scanning, plus Spot, right-sizing and Savings Plans awareness.
AWS EKS consulting FAQ.
What does AWS EKS consulting include?
It covers the full lifecycle of running Amazon EKS in production: cluster and landing-zone design (VPC CNI, IRSA, IAM, node groups versus Fargate), migration onto EKS from ECS or EC2, autoscaling with Karpenter or Cluster Autoscaler and the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, core add-ons such as the AWS Load Balancer Controller, EBS and EFS CSI drivers and ExternalDNS, GitOps delivery with Argo CD or Flux, observability across CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana and OpenTelemetry, and security and cost hardening. Everything ships as Terraform or OpenTofu so your team owns it.
Should we use EKS managed node groups or Fargate?
It depends on the workload. Managed node groups, increasingly provisioned by Karpenter, give you full control over instance types, GPUs, Spot capacity and DaemonSets, which suits steady or spiky compute and anything that needs node-level tuning. Fargate removes node management for bursty, isolated or low-toil workloads where per-pod billing and a smaller attack surface matter more than instance control. Most estates end up mixed: Fargate for a few isolated services, Karpenter-managed nodes for the bulk. We size the split against your actual traffic and cost profile rather than picking one on principle.
How do you keep EKS costs under control?
We combine Karpenter-driven consolidation, heavy use of Spot capacity for fault-tolerant workloads, and right-sized requests and limits so pods stop reserving capacity they never use. We tune autoscaling so the cluster scales to zero where it can, tag and attribute spend per team, and factor Savings Plans and Reserved capacity into the baseline that stays steady. The goal is a cluster that tracks real demand, with cost visibility your finance and engineering teams both trust.
Can you migrate us from ECS to EKS?
Yes. ECS to EKS is one of the most common paths we run. We map task definitions and services to Kubernetes deployments, translate service discovery and load balancing to the AWS Load Balancer Controller and ExternalDNS, move secrets and IAM task roles onto IRSA, and cut traffic over workload by workload behind a blue-green or canary strategy with a tested rollback at each wave. Stateful services and data stores are planned separately so nothing moves blindly.
Do you help pass a security review on EKS?
Yes. We harden the cluster against the CIS EKS benchmark: least-privilege RBAC, IRSA scoped per workload, network policies, private endpoints, image scanning and admission controls. When a review needs independent evidence, this connects to our penetration testing practice, which tests the cluster and the applications on it the way an attacker would and produces a report you can hand to auditors, customers or a security team.
Planning or fixing an EKS cluster?
Start with the readiness scorecard, or book a free 30-minute architecture call. A senior engineer reviews your AWS setup and workloads and returns a concrete EKS landing-zone and migration plan.