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5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Running EKS in Production

Running Amazon EKS in a tutorial and running it in production are two very different experiences. After deploying a 5-microservice retail store application with real AWS services, here are the five lessons that would have saved me time, money, and plenty of late-night debugging sessions.

1. Cluster Autoscaler Doesn’t Consolidate Nodes

Cluster Autoscaler only removes empty nodes. If a node is running a single tiny pod at 10% utilization, it stays — and you keep paying for it.

Building a Complete Observability Stack for EKS with OpenTelemetry and ADOT

Most Kubernetes observability setups are incomplete. Teams install Prometheus, wire up a few dashboards, and call it done. Then a production incident hits and they’re grepping through logs at 3 AM, trying to find a needle in a haystack.

The problem isn’t the tooling — it’s the approach. You need all three observability pillars working together: Traces, Logs, and Metrics. Here’s how I built a complete stack on EKS using AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT).

How to Handle Spot Instance Interruptions on EKS with Zero Downtime

“Spot instances are too risky for production.”

That’s the most common objection I hear from DevOps engineers. And it’s wrong. With the right architecture, you can run production workloads on Spot instances with 70% cost savings and zero downtime during interruptions. Here’s exactly how.

The Fear (and Why It’s Overblown)

The concern is legitimate on the surface: AWS can reclaim a Spot instance with just 2 minutes of notice. Without preparation, your pods get terminated, requests fail, and users see errors.