The Complete Guide to Production EKS with Terraform

#kubernetes #terraform #aws #devops

"Production-ready EKS deployment with Terraform — Karpenter autoscaling, self-healing nodes, pod security standards, and multi-AZ high availability."

EKS is the most popular managed Kubernetes service, but most deployments I've seen in production audits are dangerously under-configured. Missing node auto-remediation, no pod security standards, manual scaling — the list goes on.

This guide covers everything you need for production EKS.

EKS vs AKS vs GKE

Feature	EKS	AKS	GKE
Control Plane Cost	$0.10/hr	Free	Free (Standard)
Autopilot Mode	No (use Karpenter)	No	Yes
Node Auto-Repair	Manual/Lambda	Built-in	Built-in
Service Mesh	App Mesh / Istio	Istio	Anthos / Istio
GPU Support	p4d, g5	NC, ND series	T4, A100

Terraform Module

module "eks" {
  source = "github.com/kogunlowo123/terraform-aws-auto-healing-eks"

  cluster_name    = "production-cluster"
  cluster_version = "1.29"
  vpc_id          = module.vpc.vpc_id
  subnet_ids      = module.vpc.private_subnet_ids

  node_groups = [{
    name           = "general"
    instance_types = ["m6i.xlarge", "m6i.2xlarge"]
    min_size       = 3
    max_size       = 20
    desired_size   = 5
  }]

  enable_karpenter                = true
  enable_cluster_autoscaler       = false  # Use Karpenter instead
  enable_node_termination_handler = true
  enable_auto_remediation         = true
}

Best Practices

Use Karpenter over Cluster Autoscaler for faster scaling and better bin-packing
Enable pod disruption budgets for every production workload
Use node termination handler for spot instance graceful shutdown
Implement network policies with Calico or Cilium
Enable control plane logging to CloudWatch
Use IRSA (IAM Roles for Service Accounts) instead of node-level IAM