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...
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