EKS consulting from an AWS Advanced Tier Partner who will tell you the truth: for most scale-ups, ECS is the cleaner path. When Kubernetes genuinely earns its keep — existing Helm charts, multi-cloud portability, ecosystem tooling, real in-house K8s expertise — we build it properly: Karpenter autoscaling, IRSA, network policy, and a real upgrade cadence. Founder-led on every engagement.
The EKS baseline we ship on.
We deliver both ECS and EKS under our DevOps practice, so we have no incentive to steer you toward Kubernetes. For most scale-ups we recommend ECS. EKS earns its place when the reasons below are genuinely yours — not because Kubernetes is on the résumé.
A managed control plane is the easy part. Production readiness is these four pillars — autoscaling, identity, network policy, and upgrades — done properly from day one. Broader platform needs sit under our AWS DevOps services, and the container fundamentals under containerization.
We run Karpenter for node autoscaling instead of hand-tuned managed node groups. It provisions right-sized nodes from whatever instance types actually fit your pending pods, consolidates underused capacity automatically, and makes Spot practical by diversifying across families with graceful interruption handling. The result is fewer idle nodes and a cluster that tracks real demand rather than a static guess.
Pods get AWS permissions through IRSA (IAM Roles for Service Accounts) or EKS Pod Identity — mapped via OIDC to a dedicated role per workload, never shared node credentials or long-lived keys. One role, one service account, one scoped policy. Secrets stay in Secrets Manager or are pulled with External Secrets, so credentials never sit in a manifest or an environment variable.
Default-open pod networking is a liability. We apply Kubernetes network policies — enforced by the Amazon VPC CNI or Cilium — so services only talk to what they must, with private subnets for worker nodes and no public IPs on workloads. Ingress runs through the AWS Load Balancer Controller, and east-west traffic is constrained by policy rather than hope.
AWS supports each Kubernetes minor version for a defined window before it moves to paid extended support, so upgrades are a scheduled rhythm, not an emergency. We validate add-ons against the target version, stage control-plane and node upgrades behind health checks, and roll nodes with pod disruption budgets so services stay up. GitOps with Argo CD keeps cluster state reviewable and reproducible throughout.
If you already run Kubernetes elsewhere, the images and manifests largely carry over — the work is in the platform seams. Three routes we handle, each with a parallel-run cluster and a rollback point. Not sure EKS is the destination? We will say so; see ECS and our DigitalOcean K8s case study.
DigitalOcean Kubernetes service accounts move to IRSA, DO load balancers to the AWS Load Balancer Controller, and block storage to the EBS CSI driver. Your data layer moves to RDS or Aurora with a rehearsed cutover. We have run the DigitalOcean-to-AWS path in production — see the DigitalOcean to AWS migration.
GKE Workload Identity maps to IRSA, GCP ingress to the ALB Controller, and persistent volumes to EBS or EFS CSI drivers. Cloud SQL moves to RDS or Aurora. As a Google Cloud partner too, we understand both sides of the seam and migrate the platform primitives cleanly rather than lifting a broken abstraction across.
kubeadm, kops, or hand-rolled clusters carry real operational risk — etcd, control-plane HA, and upgrades all fall on you. We move workloads onto the EKS managed control plane, replace self-managed nodes with Karpenter, and fold in IRSA, network policy, and a supported upgrade cadence so the platform stops being a second full-time job.
EKS cost usually leaks in three places: nodes sized for phantom demand, on-demand capacity where interruption-tolerant workloads could run on Spot, and pod requests that lock in headroom nobody uses. The control plane has a fixed per-cluster hourly fee — the variable spend is all in the compute, and that is where the work is.
Karpenter consolidation is the single biggest lever: it bin-packs pods onto fewer, cheaper nodes and removes idle capacity automatically. On top of that we run Spot for the workloads that tolerate interruption, right-size requests and limits against real usage, and rationalise cluster count — often fewer clusters with namespace and network-policy isolation instead of one per team. Cost work runs under our DevOps practice, the same rigour we bring to ECS engagements.
Review your EKS spend →Don't see your question? Book a 30-minute architecture review and ask directly — including whether EKS is even the right call.
Book a call →Whether you're planning an EKS build, migrating a Kubernetes cluster to AWS, tuning Karpenter and Spot, or genuinely unsure whether ECS would serve you better — start with a free architecture review directly with the founder. One concrete recommendation, no commitment required.
★AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner · ISO 27001:2022 · ECS & EKS Delivered Under One Practice
