What is Amazon EKS, and what does AWS manage versus what you manage?
AWS · Intermediate level
Answer
EKS is AWS-managed Kubernetes. AWS manages the control plane infrastructure, while I manage workloads, nodes or Fargate choices, add-ons, IAM, networking, security, observability, upgrades, and reliability practices.
Technical explanation
EKS removes control-plane infrastructure work but not Kubernetes platform engineering.
EKS is managed Kubernetes, not no-ops Kubernetes: IAM, networking, add-ons, node strategy, upgrades, RBAC, policies, and workload reliability remain customer responsibilities.
Workload identity, private networking, image security, ingress standards, autoscaling, and observability are foundational controls for production clusters.
Troubleshooting EKS requires separating control-plane, node, CNI, scheduler, ingress, and application failure domains.
Hands-on example
1. Create or use an EKS sandbox cluster with private subnets, managed add-ons, workload IAM, and a sample namespace.
2. Deploy a small container from ECR using Kubernetes manifests or Helm, with readiness/liveness probes and resource requests.
3. Add ingress/load balancing, pod IAM, logging, metrics, and network/security controls relevant to the question.
4. Test node replacement, pod rescheduling, image pulls, access control, and rollback.
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