Container & EKS Services on AWS

Containers give you portability, predictable resource allocation, and the operational maturity that serverless can't provide for long-running, stateful, or high-throughput workloads. The question isn't containers vs. serverless — it's choosing the right tool for the job and executing it cleanly.

EKS and ECS Fargate sit at the center of most serious AWS workload strategies. When your application has consistent throughput, needs fine-grained networking control, runs stateful services, or requires Kubernetes-native tooling your team already knows — containers win. For event-driven, variable-throughput work without those requirements, our Serverless team is often the better starting point. Once you're running containers, CI/CD pipelines are the next lever for shipping velocity.

EFS DevOps has run Kubernetes in production since before EKS existed. We've migrated teams off self-managed EC2 fleets, right-sized clusters that were burning 60% of spend on idle capacity, and built platform engineering foundations that let application teams deploy without filing a ticket.

What We Deliver

• EKS cluster design & operations — Managed node groups, Karpenter node pools for intelligent right-sizing, cluster autoscaler configuration, add-on management (VPC CNI, CoreDNS, kube-proxy), and multi-AZ topology spread. We design clusters that don't require heroics to operate.
• ECS Fargate workloads — Task definition design, Fargate profiles, service auto-scaling (target tracking + step scaling), capacity provider strategies, and sidecar patterns for observability and secrets injection. Fargate removes node management entirely for teams that don't need Kubernetes surface area.
• Cost optimization — Karpenter consolidation policies, Spot instance integration with fallback to On-Demand, resource request/limit right-sizing, and HPA/VPA/KEDA autoscaling to match capacity to actual demand. Most clusters we inherit are 40–70% over-provisioned.
• ECR lifecycle policies & image strategy — Tag immutability, vulnerability scanning integration, lifecycle rules to manage storage cost, and multi-architecture image builds for ARM/Graviton adoption.
• GitOps with ArgoCD or Flux — Declarative cluster state management, application sets for multi-environment promotion, sync policies, and RBAC design so application teams can self-serve without cluster-admin access.
• Helm chart development — Reusable chart patterns for your application types, values hierarchy for environment promotion (dev - staging - prod), and chart testing pipelines.
• Migration from EC2 — Lift-and-containerize strategy, strangler fig patterns for monoliths, and phased cutover planning that keeps production traffic stable throughout the migration.
• Observability stack — Prometheus/Grafana on EKS, Container Insights for ECS, distributed tracing with X-Ray or OpenTelemetry, and log aggregation to CloudWatch or OpenSearch.