Overview Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a managed Kubernetes service that enables customers to run Kubernetes (K8s) on AWS without needing to install, operate, and maintain their own K8s control plane. While AWS takes care of managing the K8s control plane and etcd database, customers are responsible for the identity and access management, networking, worker nodes, pod security, and so on.

EKS offers a variety of operational models for managing the nodes within an AWS environment. Customers can choose to manage their own, or have AWS manage their nodes using serverless services like AWS Fargate. As customers move from fully self-hosted to serverless nodes, AWS will assume additional management responsibilities, reducing the customers operational overheads. Depending on the workload requirements, selecting the wrong operational model can have a significant impact on performance, operational overhead, and cost effectiveness of the entire platform.

To achieve the most out of running K8s on the AWS platform customers need to integrate with AWS native services and follow best practice guidance for the platform. Cevo bring experienced consultants and knowledge gained from past engagements to assist customers with assessing and adopting EKS best practices across all pillars of a well-architected AWS environment.

Process

• Cevo’s Cloud Consultants will work with you through discovery workshops to understand your current environment, business priorities, and requirements for your target state EKS environment. We’ll dive deep into your operational, security, reliability and performance needs to ensure that our recommendations are pragmatic, relevant, and fit for purpose
• We’ll review our recommendations with you, and agree on an implementation strategy and roadmap, as well as acceptance criteria and skills uplift.
• We’ll create infrastructure-as-code and EKS provisioning pipelines including control plane services for security, scaling, RBAC, DNS, etc
• Our consultants will help you setup AWS service integration components including storage class drivers for EBS, EFS andFSx (as required), container networking, load balancing and SSL certificate management, configuration and secrets management, observability and container insights
• We’ll also setup and configure git-based deployments for application workloads into the EKS environment
• To mitigate technical risks and we’ll conduct spikes to compare between K8s native services and AWS managed services.
• As we implement your new EKS foundation, we’ll work with your team to ensure that they are up-skilled and equipped to manage the environment before hand-over.
• Once complete, we can offer ongoing management of your EKS environment, or we can help you through continuous training to increase your organisation’s cloud skills still further.

Benefits

• Best-practice EKS foundation to support your current and future business requirements.
• Reduction in operational overheads through more efficient compute resource provisioning and automatic K8s application scaling
• Remove the need to provision and manage servers altogether using AWS Fargate
• Improve security posture of K8s environment with security patches automatically applied to your cluster’s control plane
• Automatically detect and replace unhealthy control plane nodes
• Best-practice skills uplift for your team.