Amazon EKS Reviews

I use Amazon EKS for managing production environments. I have worked for different companies over the past three years, managing microservice applications on Amazon EKS to deploy application code to the environment, including the production environment. We use DevOps methodology to deploy these services.

The most beneficial aspect of Amazon EKS is that it helps manage the Kubernetes master node, so I don't need to maintain the master node, including tasks like upgrading. This allows me to focus on business code. If using services like Fargate, I only need to maintain my workload, simply uploading code that will be deployed to the Kubernetes cluster. This is especially beneficial for startup companies that lack the technical resources to manage the Kubernetes cluster. Furthermore, Amazon EKS allows me to utilize Kubernetes cluster-level expansion. If there’s insufficient resource on a machine, the cluster can automatically expand to add new nodes.

My main use cases for Amazon EKS are securing the clusters and providing mesh gateways between the clusters.

The features that I find useful in Amazon EKS are Istio, Webhooks, service accounts, and ReplicaSets with different service accounts and accounts that we work with.

The main benefits that I received from using Amazon EKS are that it is a managed cluster and offers simplicity.

Amazon EKS is used as a container orchestration platform. Customers use it to develop applications which are containerized and need to be deployed. Kubernetes is the most popular platform across the industry.

Amazon EKS offers replatforming and migration capabilities to our customers, enabling them to move from AWS to other platforms like AKS with minimal changes. It has also helped in smooth integration with other AWS services, especially API gateways and databases.

Our primary use case is related to our ecommerce solution, which is very high in terms of data in the database and products. It has one hundred thousand first line items. We developed a system connected with AWS services to translate search keywords into different languages and improve search results accuracy on our ecommerce site.

The scalability has really helped us a lot in enhancing the customer experience and ensuring quick results. The ROI is really good, especially when compared with other services on-premises.

I am working mostly on AWS infrastructure services, such as EC2, EKS, RDS, CloudFormation, IAM, and CloudWatch. I have around one year of experience with Kubernetes and have been using AWS services continuously for three years. My responsibilities include working on server storage, containerization, monitoring, and access policies.

Simplifies Kubernetes setup and management.AWS handles cluster upgrades, patches, and availability.Seamlessly integrates with AWS services like IAM, CloudWatch, and VPC.Access to advanced networking, security, and monitoring tools.EKS automatically deploys the Kubernetes control plane across multiple AWS Availability Zones for fault tolerance.

For EKS, we deployed a Django application. The application built the whole image and stored it in ECR (Elastic Container Registry). We stored the code repository in GitHub, but the image was in ECR. We also had another repository for the Kubernetes manifest files. So we were deploying it in a different image, and the code was in a different image. We had a whole pipeline for deployment, from CodePipeline to ECR, and then from ECR to Kubernetes.

I work with different AWS solutions, such as Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and VPC. I use services like EC2, S3, and VPC every day, so I'm not including those. I've also used API Gateway, and currently, I also use AWS Bedrock.

The good thing was the integration of services. The only thing we had to think about was how we were pushing the code to GitHub or Bitbucket. After that, everything was taken care of by AWS. 

Everything was connected: the code and the real-time deployment. Testing was done within the same pipeline using CodeBuild. CodeBuild was handling multiple tasks: testing the code, deploying it to ECR, and then running it on AWS Fargate for development or testing. Once it was working fine, we had an approval stage. After approval, we deployed it to EKS using the command line from the same AWS CodeBuild process.

The scalability of EKS is good. We've compared it with multiple platforms, and we've also worked with GCP. There are more good options available in GCP compared to EKS.

But the good thing about EKS is that we can use it for serverless deployments using Fargate. It gives you two options: deploy on EC2 or deploy on Fargate. EC2 runs 24/7 and costs you money, but Fargate only runs when you need it. So EKS was really helpful for saving costs with that serverless capability.