Set Up EKS Cluster
Production-ready.
Overview
EKS is AWS’s managed Kubernetes service. AWS manages the control plane (with multi-AZ resilience built in); the team owns worker nodes, networking, and add-ons. The first cluster establishes the patterns: Terraform-managed, IRSA for workload identity, GitOps for deploys. Every subsequent cluster inherits those patterns instead of recreating them.
- Production-ready managed control plane. Multi-AZ resilience built in. AWS handles the upgrades and the SLA.
- IRSA for workload identity. IAM Roles for Service Accounts replace static credentials. Modern AWS workload auth.
- Managed node groups. Auto-scaling EC2 nodes with health-based replacement. Capacity follows load.
- Fargate option plus VPC CNI. Serverless pods for variable workloads; pods receive real VPC IPs through the AWS CNI.
The approach
Three habits make a first EKS cluster production-ready: Terraform from day one for the cluster and node groups, IRSA wired up so workloads never see static credentials, and GitOps as the deploy mechanism rather than ad-hoc kubectl apply.
- Terraform-managed. AWS provider creates and manages the cluster. Configuration lives in source control, drift gets caught.
- IRSA from day one. ServiceAccounts annotated with IAM roles. Static credentials never enter the cluster.
- Managed node groups. Multi-AZ node distribution. Resilience without extra effort.
- GitOps deploy plus documented topology. Argo CD or Flux applies manifests; per-cluster the configuration documented for the next operator.
Why this compounds
Each cluster inherits the patterns established by the first one. The team’s AWS Kubernetes fluency deepens; new clusters take days instead of weeks to bring up; AWS-native integrations like IRSA, ALB Ingress, and EBS CSI fall into place naturally.
- Operational burden reduced. AWS handles the control plane. Engineering time stays on workloads.
- AWS integration is native. IRSA, ALB Ingress, EBS CSI. Glue code shrinks.
- Reusable patterns. Standard Terraform modules capture conventions across clusters.
- Year-one investment, year-two habit. First cluster is heavy lift. By the third, the template is settled.