EKS Masterclass [Day 0/15]: The 2026 Roadmap to Production-Ready Kubernetes

sourav kumar — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:53:43 +0000

The Gap in the Market

You have 4 years of experience as a DevOps Engineer.

You know AWS Services.
You’ve built Terraform modules.
You’ve designed CI/CD pipelines.
You’ve worked with linux.
You’ve worked with Docker.

But every job description now lists:

“EKS experience — Mandatory.”

Maybe you’ve used Docker.
Maybe you’ve studied kubernetes from youtube or from any course.
Maybe you’ve run a small kind or Minikube cluster for a side project.

But managing a production-grade, high-traffic Kubernetes cluster on AWS?

That’s a completely different game.

This series is for engineers who want to close that gap.

What is this Series?

Over the next 15 days, I’m going to break down what it actually takes to run Amazon EKS in production.

We’re not just doing:

kubectl apply

We’re diving deep into real-world topics like:

Architecture design
VPC networking
Cluster security
Identity & access
Autoscaling strategies
Cost optimization
Observability
Zero-downtime upgrades

All from the perspective of a Senior DevOps Engineer.

The goal is simple:

Help you think, design, and speak about EKS like someone who has run it in production.

The 15-Day Curriculum

Day	Topic	What You’ll Learn
Day 1	Why EKS?	Managed Control Plane, Shared Responsibility Model, when to choose EKS
Day 2	Cluster Provisioning & IaC	eksctl vs Terraform vs CDK, private clusters, endpoint access
Day 3	VPC CNI Networking	How pods get VPC IPs, ENI allocation, subnet sizing
Day 4	Data Plane Selection	Managed Node Groups vs Self-managed vs Fargate vs Karpenter
Day 5	Identity (IRSA)	Granting AWS permissions to pods securely
Day 6	EKS Access Entries	Modern cluster authentication replacing aws-auth
Day 7	Network Security	Security Groups for Pods & Kubernetes Network Policies
Day 8	Persistent Storage	EBS & EFS CSI drivers, dynamic provisioning
Day 9	Exposing Applications	ALB Ingress Controller vs NLB Services
Day 10	Scaling with Karpenter	Modern autoscaling & workload bin-packing
Day 11	Secrets Management	AWS Secrets Manager & external secrets integration
Day 12	Observability	Container Insights, Prometheus, Fluent Bit, logging & metrics
Day 13	Zero-Downtime Upgrades	Control plane & node upgrades safely
Day 14	Cost Optimization	Spot instances, Graviton nodes, cost strategies
Day 15	GitOps & ArgoCD	Declarative deployments, drift detection, automated rollbacks

Links to each day will be updated here as the series goes live.

Why follow this series?

I’ve spent the last 4+ years working in DevOps and cloud infrastructure, designing and operating workloads on AWS.

My experience includes:

Building production EKS clusters
Migrating workloads from EC2 to Kubernetes
Designing secure multi-AZ architectures
Handling scaling challenges
Optimizing infrastructure costs

I’ve learned that interviews — and real jobs — aren’t about remembering commands.

They’re about explaining:

Trade-offs
Architecture decisions
Failure handling
Cost vs performance choices

That’s exactly what this series focuses on.

What you’ll get throughout the series

Console Screenshots
See what the AWS UI actually looks like in real setups.

Terminal Snippets
Real commands and outputs — no theory-only walkthroughs.

Architecture Diagrams
Understand how components connect in production environments.

“Senior Engineer” Interview Tips
How to confidently answer design and scenario questions.

How to use this series

Follow me here on Dev.to to get notified daily
Save this post — I’ll keep updating it with links
Join the conversation in the comments

If you’re facing a real EKS challenge, drop it — I may cover it in the series.

Let’s Build Something Production-Ready

We start tomorrow with:

Day 1 — Why EKS?

Understanding the Managed Control Plane & Architecture Foundations

See you there...

DEV Community: sourav kumar