12 posts tagged with "Kubernetes"

When I started, the EKS setup had the basics — workloads running, traffic flowing, deployments working. But from a security perspective, there was a lot of surface area: static AWS access keys baked into apps, default Amazon Linux nodes, no container image scanning, and a publicly accessible Kubernetes API. I hardened the stack in one month, one week at a time. Here is the journey.

I spent a focused quarter understanding and reducing cloud costs without hurting reliability or developer velocity. By the end of it, the line items below added up to roughly $1,800 USD per month — over $20k annualized — from our AWS and GCP bills. Spot and GPU Reserved Instance discounts sit on top of that and are harder to pin to a single number.

Here are the 8 things that actually moved the needle.