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.
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:
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.
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.
We frame the work around a few core pillars that almost every Amazon EKS platform needs to get right:
By the end of the engagement, you get concrete assets your team can act on. Your deliverables include:
This assessment is ideal if you:
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.
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.