Tag: kubernetes

Cost Optimization & FinOps Part 19

Jun 13, 2026 palaniappan p 6 min

Amazon EKS Pricing: Control Plane, Extended Support, Auto Mode

EKS control planes are $73/month per cluster. Stay on a Kubernetes version beyond its 14-month standard support and Extended Support kicks in at +$0.50/hour — $438/month per cluster, a 5× multiplier. EKS Auto Mode adds a ~12% markup over standard EC2 + EBS for managed compute simplicity. The compute side (Karpenter, Spot, Graviton) is where most of the bill lives.

DevOps & CI/CD Part 4

Jun 12, 2026 palaniappan p 1 min

Container Runtime Security: seccomp, AppArmor, and EKS Pod Security

Default Docker seccomp is not enough for regulated workloads. EKS Pod Security Standards, seccomp profiles, and Fargate platform version constraints.

DevOps & CI/CD Part 2

Jun 12, 2026 palaniappan p 2 min

Kubernetes Pod Disruption Budgets on EKS: Zero-Downtime Upgrades

Cluster upgrades and Karpenter consolidation look healthy in the console while PDB-blocked evictions freeze your node drain for 45 minutes. This guide wires minAvailable, maxUnavailable, and EKS managed node group semantics.

DevOps & CI/CD Part 3

Jun 12, 2026 palaniappan p 2 min

Service Mesh Traffic Shifting: VPC Lattice, Istio on EKS, and App Mesh EOL

App Mesh is legacy path—new meshes should start with VPC Lattice for AWS-native east-west or Istio on EKS when you need full L7 policy. Traffic shifting without duplicating load balancers per service.

DevOps & CI/CD

Jun 10, 2026 palaniappan p 5 min

GitOps on Amazon EKS (2026): Argo CD vs Flux, App-of-Apps, and the Decisions That Actually Bite

AWS Prescriptive Guidance says Argo CD and Flux both handle most GitOps scenarios capably — so picking one is a fit decision, not a winner. The decisions that actually cause incidents are the ones underneath: plaintext secrets in the GitOps repo, CI running kubectl apply and reintroducing drift, no App-of-Apps so onboarding is click-ops, and repo topology you can't change later. Here is the Argo CD vs Flux matrix, an App-of-Apps example, and the five traps independent of tool.

DevOps & CI/CD

Apr 22, 2026 palaniappan p 16 min

How to Host n8n on AWS EKS: A Production-Ready Deployment Guide

Deploy n8n workflow automation on AWS EKS with RDS PostgreSQL, ALB ingress, ACM TLS, Secrets Manager, CloudWatch, WAF, and S3 backups. Full production architecture covering HA, encryption, HPA, and Karpenter autoscaling.

DevOps & CI/CD

Apr 11, 2026 palaniappan p 11 min

What DevOps Guides Don't Tell You About Production AWS

Most DevOps guides teach what AWS services are. Production teaches what happens when 200 engineers use them together. Here's the gap.

Cloud Architecture Part 5

Apr 3, 2026 palaniappan p 9 min

How to Deploy EKS with Karpenter for Cost-Optimized Autoscaling

Karpenter replaces Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler with intelligent bin-packing and just-in-time node provisioning. This guide covers setup, consolidation, cost optimization, and production patterns for EKS clusters.

Cost Optimization & FinOps

Apr 2, 2026 palaniappan p 6 min

Karpenter vs Cluster Autoscaler: EKS Node Cost Optimization in 2026

Karpenter replaces Cluster Autoscaler as the recommended EKS node autoscaler. It provisions nodes faster, selects better-fit instance types per workload, and consolidates nodes more aggressively — typically reducing EKS compute costs by 20-40% compared to an equivalent Cluster Autoscaler deployment.