Amazon Web Services (AWS) has shifted more of the infrastructure burden from the customer to the service by automating Kubernetes management with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Auto Mode and EKS Capabilities. These features automate much of the cluster infrastructure (provisioning, scaling, networking, and storage) on top of the core EKS control plane. What they don’t do is own your Kubernetes platform end‑to‑end: architecture, add‑ons, upgrades, and 24×7 incident response are still your team’s responsibility.
Fairwinds Managed Kubernetes‑as‑a‑Service (KaaS) is designed for teams that want to hand off that platform ownership. Instead of paying AWS a premium support add-on fee and then staffing an internal platform team anyway, you pay for a managed platform where Fairwinds is designing, running, and supporting Kubernetes across your clusters.
In this post, you'll learn what EKS Auto Mode and EKS Capabilities actually manage, what Fairwinds Managed KaaS takes off your plate, and how the costs compare when you include both AWS fees and the engineers who still have to run the platform.
EKS Auto Mode focuses on automating the infrastructure layer: automatic node provisioning, scaling, and lifecycle management, plus some configuration and security best practices out of the box. It also bundles and manages core components like networking, storage, and OS images for the compute it controls, reducing day‑to‑day toil. You still own everything above that layer: the cluster itself, the workloads, and everything around them, including application deployment pipelines, cluster‑level policies, additional add-ons and most incident response.
When you add EKS Capabilities, you are still assembling AWS‑managed pieces for specific concerns, including Managed Argo CD, Kubernetes Resource Operators (KRO), and AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK). AWS does a good job of integrating these pieces and shipping sensible defaults, but they are still individual services you must choose, configure, and operate correctly for your environment. AWS and partners also provide reference architectures and best‑practice guidance, but they don’t take ongoing responsibility for designing and operating your specific platform.
That means you still don’t get:
AWS is charging you to handle a portion of the infrastructure side of Kubernetes, not to be your platform team. For some organizations with a small number of straightforward clusters, that's exactly the right trade‑off; for others, it leaves a large and expensive gap in the middle once you factor in architecture, add‑on lifecycle, and 24×7 operations.
Fairwinds Managed KaaS starts from a different premise: most teams don’t want to become Kubernetes infrastructure experts; they want a reliable, secure, cost‑efficient platform that lets them ship software without living in kubectl and AWS tickets. So instead of just enabling features, Fairwinds takes responsibility for the Kubernetes platform layer: cluster architecture, core add‑ons, upgrades, and 24×7 operations.;
Your teams still own application code, product‑specific runbooks, and business decisions; Fairwinds owns the health and evolution of the platform those workloads run on. In practice, that often means faster time to production and fewer infrastructure‑driven incidents compared to running EKS alone plus an internal platform team.
"We actually don't think about our stack anymore. We do what we need to do. We write code. It gets deployed. Everything works."
- Stan, Development Team Member at Fathom (A Fairwinds Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service customer)
How that shows up day‑to‑day:
Those components are installed, configured, upgraded, and monitored for you. Fairwinds maintain a standardized stack across customers, so your engineers aren’t spending cycles chasing add‑on CVEs and upgrade windows.
Now let’s look at a concrete example of a client with 150 m5a.4xlarge nodes. To keep the math simple, assume this cluster spends roughly $1,000,000 per year on EC2 for those 150 nodes running 24×7, which is roughly consistent with current on‑demand pricing for this node class and usage pattern.
At a 12% management fee, that $1,000,000 EC2 bill implies an Auto Mode charge of about $120,000 per year (1,000,000 × 0.12 ≈ 120,000). The exact amount will vary with your instance mix, Region, and discounts, but this example shows the order of magnitude of the Auto Mode surcharge for a mid‑sized cluster.
That 120,000 USD per year is not paying for a platform team, 24×7 on‑call, architecture, or add‑on management; it's purely the infrastructure management premium to get Auto Mode’s features on top of your existing EKS and EC2 costs.
Here’s what many organizations end up paying for a single moderately sized environment:
|
Line item |
EKS Auto Mode + Capabilities |
Fairwinds Managed KaaS |
|
EKS control plane |
Yes (AWS pricing per cluster) |
Yes (AWS pricing remains the same) |
|
EC2 compute |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Auto Mode management fee |
~120,000 USD / year (150 m5a.4xlarge nodes at ~12%) |
0 |
|
Internal platform/SRE engineer |
Often ≥1 FTE (for example, a US‑based senior SRE with 150,000–200,000 USD base comp plus 20–30% benefits and overhead) for K8s management |
Still required, but spending more time on enablement and app‑facing work instead of day‑to‑day K8s efforts |
|
Fairwinds Managed KaaS subscription |
0 |
Priced to cover multiple clusters; commonly less than the cost of a single senior Kubernetes engineer for similar platform scope |
These are illustrative numbers, not a quote, but they show a simple pattern: Auto Mode adds a percentage fee on your compute while you still fund a platform team, whereas Fairwinds replaces much of that platform headcount with a fixed subscription and a platform designed, built, and maintained for your unique needs.
For many organizations, once you include platform headcount, on‑call overhead, and integration work, the “cheap” AWS feature ends up attached to an expensive home‑grown platform.
All of this means the same responsibilities (architecture, add‑ons, and 24×7 operations) remain on your team unless you hand the platform to a managed provider.
With Fairwinds Managed KaaS, you get:
EKS Auto Mode and EKS Capabilities are good building blocks, but they still leave you building and operating the platform with your own engineering time and budget. Fairwinds Managed KaaS gives you the platform, the playbooks, and the people. When you compare the full cost of ownership, not just the line item for an AWS feature toggle, the managed platform plus expert team often ends up being the more efficient and predictable way to run Kubernetes at scale. In customer environments moving from self‑managed EKS to Managed KaaS, Fairwinds reduces internal platform toil while keeping or improving reliability and cost efficiency.
If your team is ready to stop running Kubernetes and start just using it, it makes sense to evaluate Fairwinds Managed KaaS.