What I Learned Building on AWS EKS

Creating Pods and Deployments is straightforward once the Kubernetes basics are in place. The more difficult part is securely giving workloads access to AWS services without embedding long-lived credentials inside containers.

IAM Roles for Service Accounts, commonly known as IRSA, allow a Kubernetes ServiceAccount to assume a specific AWS IAM role. Getting this relationship correct requires careful coordination between cluster identity providers, trust policies, namespaces and service account annotations.

With ArgoCD watching a repository of Kubernetes manifests, deployment is no longer a manual sequence of kubectl commands. A merge updates the desired state in Git, and ArgoCD reconciles the cluster to match.

This creates an auditable deployment history and makes rollback easier because the intended application state is version controlled alongside the source code.

A deployment is not complete just because a manifest was applied. Readiness probes, liveness probes, rollout status, logs and metrics are what make a deployment observable and easier to troubleshoot.

The most useful setup is one where a failed deployment provides enough signals to identify whether the issue is caused by image configuration, application startup, networking, permissions or resource limits.