Containers
Organizational best practices for implementing EKS Anywhere at scale
This post was authored by Mihir Mangalvedhekar, Sr. GenAI Specialist, Next Gen Developer Experience, AWS and co-written with Rajbir Singh, Senior Technical Account Manager.
Many users are taking a container-first approach for on-premises workloads using Kubernetes. Amazon EKS Anywhere lets you create and operate Kubernetes clusters on your own infrastructure. EKS Anywhere builds on the strengths of Amazon EKS Distro and provides open source software that’s up to date and patched so you can have an on- premises Kubernetes environment that’s more reliable than a self-managed Kubernetes offering. In this post, we explore best practices that can help you successfully adopt EKS Anywhere at scale across your organization, covering topics such as engagement models, support frameworks, executive engagement strategies, and learning and enablement initiatives. Whether you are just getting started with EKS Anywhere or looking to optimize your current deployment, these strategies will help you achieve a robust, secure, and performant organization-wide Kubernetes implementation. Implementing the right organizational strategies allows you to integrate EKS Anywhere into your IT landscape, empowering your business units and application teams to develop, deploy, and manage modern applications with greater speed and efficiency.
AWS advocates for a structured four-phased approach for your EKS Anywhere deployments as shown in the following figure:
- EKS Anywhere engagement model
- EKS Anywhere support model
- Executive engagement and reporting
- Enablement
![Figure1: Roadmap to implement EKS Anywhere at scale](https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/fe2ef495a1152561572949784c16bf23abb28057/2025/01/24/Picture1-5.png)
Figure1: Roadmap to implement EKS Anywhere at scale
These phases provide a clear roadmap for transitioning applications to EKS Anywhere, successful migration journeys, mitigating risks, and promoting skill development within your organization.
These phases are offered as general guidance, rather than a strict requirement. Their applicability may vary depending on the specific use case.
Phase 1: Establish the EKS Anywhere engagement model and develop a tracker with the customer
An engagement model is broadly defined as a strategic framework that shapes interactions between a business and its customers, a plan that describes the specifics of collaborating with a customer during the project, and the way subject matter experts are engaged in the project, areas of responsibility, timelines, issue, risk tracking, and overall program management.
Your EKS Anywhere program engagement model should cover eight areas (as shown in the following figure) and follow an agile approach with recurring customer engagement.
Defining the following during the initial phase of the program sets the project off on the right track.
- Defining Roles and responsibilities: Defining roles and responsibilities early allows you to bring clarity, accountability, and effective collaboration across teams. Ensuring alignment between the AWS Customer Solutions Manager and the Engineering Program Manager at the customer also enables strategic guidance throughout the project, building customer relationships, and accelerating adoption.
- Developing a RACI Matrix: A RACI matrix is a program roles and responsibility assignment chart that maps out every task, milestone, or key decisions involved in completing a project. Furthermore, it assigns which roles are responsible for each action item, who is accountable, and who needs to be consulted or informed.
- Establish a communications plan: An effective communications plan provides guidelines for project meetings, reporting, and use of communication channels and tools. You could use tools such as Amazon Chime and Cisco Webex to collaborate over meetings and tools such as Box, Quip, Smartsheet, and Excel to collaborate asynchronously. Phase 3 covers more details regarding effective executive communications.
![Figure 2: EKS Anywhere engagement model](https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/fe2ef495a1152561572949784c16bf23abb28057/2025/01/24/Picture2-3.png)
Figure 2: EKS Anywhere engagement model
Successful implementation of EKS Anywhere at scale involves coordination and collaboration among various stakeholders within the organization. Here are the key stakeholders to consider:
- Platform Team: This team is responsible for the underlying infrastructure and platform on which EKS Anywhere runs. They work closely with the AWS Service Team and the AWS Enterprise Support team to make sure that the platform is configured and maintained correctly to support EKS Anywhere at scale.
- Infrastructure Team: This team plays a crucial role in the implementation of EKS Anywhere. Their responsibilities span across various aspects of infrastructure management, security and compliance, and operational maintenance such as support and troubleshooting.
- AWS Service Team: This team is responsible for the overall management and support of EKS Anywhere. They work closely with the AWS Enterprise Support team and platform teams to make sure of seamless operations and address any issues or concerns related to EKS Anywhere.
- AWS Enterprise Support Team: This team provides dedicated support and guidance to the organization, helping them resolve technical issues, optimize their EKS Anywhere deployment, and use best practices.
- End-users: These are the developers, engineers, and operations teams within the organization who are using EKS Anywhere to deploy and manage their applications. Their feedback and requirements play a crucial role in shaping the EKS Anywhere implementation and making sure it meets their needs.
Best practices to develop a shared customer program tracker and a feedback loop mechanism
Establish a shared program tracker with the customer over a collaboration tool such as Box to monitor issues, feature requests, milestones, status, and weekly progress. This ensures bi-directional transparency across the customer executive leadership team, customer cloud engineering teams, AWS service teams, and the AWS account team.
ID | Area | Description | Priority | Status | Type | Target release | Comments |
1 | Customer Feature | A concise overview of the new functionality, highlighting its key benefits and how it enhances the user experience. | P0 | In-Progress | Feature | version X | Insightful observations pertaining to the task at hand. |
Your tracker should include the following fields:
- Area: can be categorized into four broad buckets
- Customer feature request
- Upgrades
- Operational improvements
- Stability improvements
- Description: a detailed description of the issue or request.
- Priority code: used to rank activities and tasks based on their order of importance, impact, urgency, and effort.
- P0: highest priority, which contains most crucial tasks that are blockers and impact the whole program. These activities typically have complex dependencies, are urgent, and need escalation.
- P1: medium priority, which includes activities such as optimizations and can be planned ahead. They typically have a medium level of complexity, medium to high level of effort, and a fast turn-around time.
- P2: low priority, which includes ”nice-to-have” feature requests, activities that have short-term workarounds but need long-term solutions, and third-party support. These typically are important but not urgent and can be deferred to until P0 items are resolved.
- Status: helps identify the current state of the activity categorized in terms of the following:
- Scoping: to understand the goals, timeline, and success criteria of the activity and develop a plan
- In-Progress: to execute according to the plans developed in the previous phase according to schedule and simultaneously monitor and track progress.
- Roadmap
- On-Hold
- Resolved
- Closed
- Type: classified as bug, feature, or improvement.
- Target Release: indicates the release version and date.
- Comments: to capture ongoing notes and next steps.
To improve communication and project performance, you must establish a feedback loop that continuously incorporates feedback from customers and stakeholders. The feedback loop should be implemented for every customer touchpoint during each sprint, as shown in the following figure.
- Recurring engineering meeting cadence: you should meet all your engineering stakeholders on a regular cadence to review the shared tracker, discuss status, update next steps, and identify open items.
- Bi-weekly leadership cadence: you should follow a bi-weekly leadership cadence that provides a forum to discuss the program’s progress and make sure it’s on track to meet its goals.
![Figure 3: EKS Anywhere implementation feedback loop](https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/fe2ef495a1152561572949784c16bf23abb28057/2025/01/24/Picture3-4.png)
Figure 3: EKS Anywhere implementation feedback loop
Co-develop a program management and communications plan across all stakeholders
You should set up a structured program management and communications plan that outlines how information related to the EKS Anywhere program is shared across all stakeholders.
You should use the following EKS Anywhere program communications matrix as shown below in –the following figure.
![Figure 4: Program management and communication matrix](https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/fe2ef495a1152561572949784c16bf23abb28057/2025/01/24/Picture4-2.png)
Figure 4: Program management and communication matrix
Phase 2: Customize the EKS Anywhere support model jointly with your customer
The EKS Anywhere support model, as shown in the following figure, ensures comprehensive support for successful EKS Anywhere deployments, focusing on swift issue resolution by defining severity levels, assigning ownership, and providing expert access to minimize business impact. This model accelerates operational efficiency and streamlines ticket triage. High-severity cases receive special workflow attention, making sure of prompt notification and swift response from subject matter experts. Opening high-severity tickets require requesting initial diagnostic logs to reduce communication delays. For AWS escalations to customers, a special paging mechanism monitored 24/7 by the NOC team is deployed.
![Figure 5: EKS Anywhere support model](https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/fe2ef495a1152561572949784c16bf23abb28057/2025/01/24/Picture5-1.png)
Figure 5: EKS Anywhere support model
The scope of an EKS Anywhere implementation varies across organizations, but there are opportunities to streamline the onboarding process for new or existing clusters on the EKS Anywhere platform. The support model ensures a smooth flow of problem resolution from the customer to AWS. The issue begins with the application team and is evaluated by operations teams, who assess environmental factors. If it isn’t related to the environment, then the problem is escalated to the Site Reliability Team (SRE) to check for user bugs and CI/CD pipeline issues. If it’s unresolved by SRE, then it’s forwarded to the Platform team for troubleshooting at the EKS Anywhere framework level. If it’s still unresolved, then a case is opened with AWS, and Enterprise Support is notified.
Establish Tailored RACI Matrix: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed
The RACI framework clarifies roles and responsibilities by defining who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed for each task or decision. Having separate RACI charts for the Platform, Operations, SRE, and Application teams ensures clarity and accountability within each team regarding their specific involvement. This helps avoid confusion, minimize misunderstandings, and promotes effective coordination and collaboration across teams.
The following table outlines the container platform team’s RACI chart as an example.
RACI – Container Platform Team
Description | Platform Team | AWS |
Release of GA versions, next versions, and future roadmap | R/A | I |
Perform EKS control plane update | R/A | C/I |
Milestones of platform | R/A | I |
Table 1: RACI matrix for Container Platform Team
Phase 3: Craft an executive reporting strategy and a feedback loop mechanism
Executive reporting refers to concise, informative reports for senior executives that allow them to make streamlined and informed decisions. You should limit these reports to under two pages and add an executive summary at the top to avoid confusion. You should also determine the cadence (bi-weekly preferred) at the beginning of the project.
Executive reporting is important for the following reasons:
- It helps executives make the right decisions by keeping them informed of the overall health of the EKS Anywhere program.
- It also helps executives identify potential issues and risks to the program and identify pro-active mitigation approaches
- It allows executives to identify specific areas they would like to follow-up on across all areas of the program that need strengthening.
Providing accurate and timely data in an easy-to-understand format equips executives to effectively guide the program’s strategic direction and growth. Your EKS Anywhere executive report should include the following:
- An executive summary: This section summarizes the report and should highlight the key updates, highlights, and recommendations contained within the larger report in a clear and concise manner. It should provide executives with a quick synopsis of the critical information contained in the longer report while also highlighting the overall direction of the program.
- Health dashboard: A health dashboard provides an overview of a program’s status based on key performance indicators, achievements, and feedback from customers. This holistic view of the program’s “vital signs”, including metrics, finances, and qualitative feedback, allows executives to make informed decisions about the program.
- Milestones with dates: Milestones are major touchpoints in a program’s lifecycle, serving as guideposts for tracking progress and remaining work. They can mark deadlines, important dates, or the transition between project phases. Incorporating milestones into an executive report allows executives to see actual progress as compared to the original project proposal. Milestones can be presented in a table organized by release version.
Phase 4: Custom education/technical team skill development
You can enable your teams to use EKS Anywhere through training and education that also helps your organization.
- To address skills gaps, reach modernization goals, expand the depth of your engineering talent, and equip your platform teams to guide workload journeys onto EKS Anywhere.
- Provide a comprehensive container training strategy with personalized learning, hands-on tools, and learning communities by partnering with the AWS training team.
- EKS Anywhere knowledge base: you should design an EKS Anywhere knowledge base to be accessed by engineering teams or development teams and iteratively update it as new information becomes available.
Your EKS Anywhere learning journey should include the following:
- Custom solutions that are specifically tailored to meet the unique needs of your teams’ and customers that can address the requirements of all learners, such as immersion days, tech talks, and learning events.
- A high-touch engagement model with areas for gamification and continuous learning options.
Conclusion
In this post, we explored best practices for your EKS Anywhere deployments, the key stakeholders involved, developing a shared program tracker and feedback loop, customizing the EKS Anywhere support model, crafting an executive reporting strategy, and enabling technical teams through tailored training and skill development. As the adoption of EKS Anywhere continues to gain momentum, it is clear that organizations can maximize value from this powerful solution by following a well-structured implementation model. Implementing EKS Anywhere at customer sites presents an exciting opportunity, and following these best practices allows you to make sure of a successful deployment and ongoing management of the Kubernetes clusters. Following a well-structured engagement model, a comprehensive communications plan, an end-to-end support model, and a customer enablement journey, makes sure of a successful EKS Anywhere deployment of a reliable and scalable solution that meets your customers’ needs while minimizing operational overhead.