There is a large gap between a cluster that runs and a cluster you can trust at 3am. Most EKS setups I am asked to look at were built by following a tutorial, and they are missing the parts that only matter when something goes wrong.

I build clusters for production. Everything provisioned in Terraform so it can be rebuilt from nothing, Karpenter for node autoscaling that actually consolidates and saves money, ingress with TLS that renews itself, and Helm releases that are versioned rather than applied by hand.

I have run EKS with Karpenter and Calico network policy on regulated financial infrastructure. The specific things I care about are the ones that bite later: network policy defaults, IRSA instead of node roles, pod disruption budgets, graceful termination, and whether your autoscaler behaves under a traffic spike. Before handover I kill nodes and drive traffic spikes to verify it, because untested resilience is a guess.

WHAT YOU RECEIVE The Terraform repository, the running cluster, Helm chart structure for your applications, monitoring on the higher scopes, and documentation including how to upgrade without downtime.

SCOPE LEVELS - Base: $3,500, 12 days. One cluster, fully in Terraform, Karpenter autoscaling, ingress and TLS, Helm release management. - Extended: $5,000, 16 days. Adds Calico network policy, Prometheus and Grafana, and pod security with RBAC hardening. - Full: $6,900, 22 days. Two clusters for staging and production, ArgoCD GitOps delivery, an autoscaling and cost tuning pass, and a disaster recovery runbook.

Commonly added: migrating an existing workload onto the new cluster, service mesh with Istio or Linkerd, Karpenter spot strategy and cost tuning, a supervised version upgrade with runbook, a two hour handover workshop.

If you already have a cluster and want it hardened rather than replaced, message me and I will scope that instead. It is often the better value.

TO GET STARTED, message me with what applications will run here, your stateful requirements, and whether you have actually decided on Kubernetes or want me to pressure test that decision first.