How to Move from Clusters that Mostly Work to Production‑Ready EKS

Kubernetes on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is powerful, but it is not simple. Many teams I talk to are stuck somewhere between “we are only 2 versions behind” and “I’m terrified to touch anything.” The Fairwinds Amazon EKS Infrastructure Design Assessment exists to close that gap and give you production‑ready Kubernetes infrastructure you can actually trust.

Why Get an Amazon EKS Infrastructure Design Assessment?

Running production workloads on Amazon EKS is about much more than spinning up a cluster. You're making decisions that affect security, reliability, performance, and cost for years. If those decisions are made ad hoc, or inherited from what you did last time, you end up with brittle, opaque infrastructure that slows the business down.

What you need is a clear architectural blueprint that tells you:

• How your clusters should look
• How they should be operated
• How that all ties back to your organization’s goals

For example, something I see often is a team that believes they have high availability (HA) covered because they run nodes across multiple Availability Zones (AZs). In reality, a single misconfigured load balancer or shared dependency can still be a single point of failure. The assessment surfaces issues like that and proposes concrete architectural fixes your team can implement.

What an EKS Infrastructure Design Assessment Delivers

This is a white‑glove, Architecture‑as‑a‑Service engagement that runs about three to six weeks, depending on your environment’s size and maturity. You get a dedicated senior Kubernetes engineer from Fairwinds who works directly with your team, not a rotating cast of consultants. That continuity matters when you're dealing with complex, evolving infrastructure and business requirements.

Throughout the engagement, we focus on deeply understanding your current architecture, operational challenges, and constraints, then iteratively refining recommendations with your feedback at multiple checkpoints and stakeholder sessions.

Core Assessment Focus Areas

We frame the work around a few core pillars that almost every Amazon EKS platform needs to get right:

• Scalability and performance
  Architectures are designed to grow with your organization, whether you're running a single cluster or many. We look at availability, resiliency, and cost efficiency together, because over‑provisioning your way to reliability is not a strategy.
• GitOps as the operational backbone
  We help you implement or improve GitOps workflows so infrastructure and application delivery are version‑controlled, reviewable, and repeatable. That includes patterns for infrastructure‑as‑code and collaboration models for internal and external teams.
• Security and compliance at scale
  We design an enterprise‑grade security architecture for Amazon EKS that includes identity and access control, network segmentation, and other security best practices. For regulated industries, we align designs with compliance needs, but this infrastructure assessment is not a formal audit or certification.
• Kubernetes transformation and modernization
  For teams migrating from legacy platforms or self‑managed Kubernetes clusters, we provide tailored recommendations informed by years of building and running production environments. The aim is not just to lift and shift, but to adopt patterns that will still make sense three years from now.

What You Get at the End

By the end of the engagement, you get concrete assets your team can act on. Your deliverables include:

• Infrastructure maturity assessment and written report
  We deliver a detailed report of findings and recommendations, including an infrastructure diagram of your existing state. We call out high‑risk areas, evaluate your security posture, and map where you do and do not align with Kubernetes best practices.
• Clear view of risk and readiness
  Your team walks away with confidence in the security, scalability, and operational readiness of your Amazon EKS environment, or a clear plan for how to get there. You’ll also understand your current compliance footing relative to Kubernetes norms.
• Access to Fairwinds Insights
  For the duration of the engagement, you get access to Fairwinds Insights, which supports visibility, optimization, and ongoing operational improvements as you iterate.

Who This Is (and Isn’t) For

This assessment is ideal if you:

• Are planning a new Amazon EKS deployment and want to get the foundation right.
• Need to scale or optimize an existing Kubernetes environment that has grown organically.
• Are migrating from legacy platforms or self‑managed Kubernetes clusters and want a modern design.
• Require enterprise‑grade security, compliance, and governance from day one.
• Want a clear Kubernetes roadmap aligned with business objectives, or validation for leadership or a new owner.

It’s intentionally not a hands‑on implementation service. We will not refactor your applications, operate your clusters day‑to‑day, or provide managed EKS or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) services as part of this specific engagement. We also do not cover third‑party tool licensing costs or formal compliance audits like System and Organization Controls 2 (SOC 2), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), or Payment Card Industry (PCI) certifications.

How We Work With Your Team

Over the course of the engagement, we adapt the depth and pace of the work to your environment’s size and maturity. Factors that impact duration include your current tooling, the number and complexity of services, data and stateful workloads, and team structure.

We’ll also run multiple review checkpoints and ad‑hoc stakeholder sessions to validate direction, refine assumptions, and ensure the architecture lines up with your real‑world requirements, not just a theoretical ideal. The result is an Amazon EKS infrastructure design your engineers can implement and own, with leadership‑level clarity on why it looks the way it does.

If your team is living with an Amazon EKS setup that mostly works but feels fragile, this kind of structured, end‑to‑end design assessment is often the most efficient way to get from uncertainty to a reliable, scalable, and secure Kubernetes foundation.

Ready to learn more? Book a call.