Production-ready Kubernetes on Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, Google GKE and DigitalOcean Kubernetes: designed for security, uptime and cost from day one, delivered as code, and independently audited before you go live.
Why it matters
Clusters rarely fail because Kubernetes is broken. They fail because of decisions made in the first weeks
and never revisited: a public API endpoint, cluster-admin handed out to keep a deadline,
long-lived cloud keys stored as secrets, workloads with no resource requests that starve each other and
inflate the bill, everything in a single zone, and upgrades postponed until the version reaches end of
support.
We design the platform so the secure, resilient and cost-efficient path is also the easy one for your engineers — then prove it holds with an audit by someone who did not build it.
Platforms
Each managed Kubernetes service has its own identity model, networking and autoscaling. The design uses what your platform does best instead of forcing one template everywhere.
For teams that want deep AWS integration and full control over how the cluster runs.
For organisations built on Microsoft Entra ID, Azure networking and Microsoft security tooling.
For the most automated managed Kubernetes, and data or AI workloads on Google Cloud.
For startups and smaller teams that want managed Kubernetes without the cloud-provider complexity.
Running Kubernetes yourself, on-premises or at the edge? We also design self-managed clusters (kubeadm, RKE2, k3s), with the same security baseline.
What the design covers
How many clusters, per environment or per region; namespaces, quotas and boundaries between teams and tenants.
CNI and IP planning, Gateway API or ingress, private endpoints, default-deny network policies and controlled egress.
Single sign-on for engineers, least-privilege RBAC, and workload identity so applications reach cloud services without stored keys.
Pod Security Standards, admission policies, image scanning and signing, read-only root filesystems and non-root containers.
Secrets from a managed vault via External Secrets, KMS envelope encryption, TLS everywhere and certificate automation.
Requests and limits, pod and node autoscaling, Spot where safe, right-sizing and cost allocation by team or product.
Multi-zone node pools, disruption budgets, topology spread, backups with tested restores, and a recovery plan with clear RPO and RTO.
Metrics, logs and traces with Prometheus and OpenTelemetry, alerts tied to service-level objectives, and audit logs kept.
Terraform for clusters, GitOps with Argo CD or Flux, environment promotion, and a version upgrade path that keeps you supported.
Choosing a platform
| Amazon EKS | Azure AKS | Google GKE | DigitalOcean DOKS | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best fit | AWS estates; teams that want full control | Microsoft and Entra ID estates | Most automated operations; data and AI | Startups and small teams; simple pricing |
| Hands-off mode | EKS Auto Mode, Fargate | AKS Automatic | Autopilot | Managed control plane, HA option |
| Node scaling | Karpenter or Cluster Autoscaler | Node auto-provisioning or Cluster Autoscaler | Cluster autoscaler, node auto-provisioning | Built-in cluster autoscaler |
| Pod identity | EKS Pod Identity, IRSA | Microsoft Entra Workload ID | Workload Identity Federation | Scoped tokens from a secret store |
| Networking | Amazon VPC CNI | Azure CNI Overlay / Cilium | Dataplane V2 (eBPF) | Cilium |
| Guardrails | Kyverno or Gatekeeper; GuardDuty | Azure Policy; Defender for Containers | Policy Controller; Binary Authorization | Kyverno or Gatekeeper |
Cloud features change often; every design is checked against the provider’s current documentation and your region.
What to expect
Workloads, traffic, data, compliance needs, team skills and budget — or a review of the cluster you already run.
Target architecture, platform choice and a written decision record for every trade-off, agreed with your team.
Terraform, GitOps and the security baseline as code, with a reference cluster your services can move onto.
Independent security audit, failover and restore tests, then runbooks and a walkthrough for your engineers.
Deliverables
Diagrams, data flows, trust boundaries and the reasoning behind each major decision.
Terraform modules for clusters, networking and identity, plus the GitOps repository layout.
Policies, RBAC and network rules as code, mapped to the CIS Kubernetes Benchmark.
Upgrades, scaling, incident response, backup restore and disaster recovery, step by step.
Expected monthly cost by environment, with the levers that move it most.
Independent findings, ranked by risk, with the fix and retest status for each.
Related: moving workloads onto the new cluster, security checks in your CI/CD pipeline, and our free container security scan for images and Kubernetes YAML.
Questions
Usually the cloud you already run on. Identity, networking, billing and the managed databases your services depend on matter more than the differences between the Kubernetes services themselves. GKE offers the most automated experience (Autopilot), EKS the deepest AWS integration and the most control, AKS fits naturally into Microsoft Entra ID and Azure estates, and DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS) is the simplest option with predictable pricing for smaller teams. We compare them against your workloads, team and budget, and write the reasoning down so the decision can be revisited later.
Not always. If you run a handful of stateless services, a simpler platform such as AWS ECS, Google Cloud Run or Azure Container Apps can be cheaper to run and easier to staff. Kubernetes earns its keep when you have many services, several teams, portability requirements or workloads that need fine-grained control. If our assessment says a simpler platform fits better, that is what we recommend.
Yes, with care. Kubernetes gives you a common way to deploy, but networking, identity, storage and managed services still differ per provider, so true multi-cloud adds real cost. We design for it when there is a clear driver, such as regulation, data residency or customer requirements, and otherwise keep you portable without paying for a second cloud you do not need.
In layers: a private API endpoint, workload identity instead of static cloud keys, least-privilege RBAC, network policies that deny by default, Pod Security Standards at the restricted level, admission policies (Kyverno or OPA Gatekeeper), signed and scanned images, encrypted secrets and audit logging. The baseline is mapped to the CIS Kubernetes Benchmark and the NSA/CISA Kubernetes Hardening Guidance, and checked by an independent audit before handover.
Yes. We start with an architecture and security review of the existing cluster, rank the findings by risk and effort, and plan the changes so they can be rolled out without downtime, including Kubernetes version upgrades that have fallen behind.
An architecture document with diagrams, a decision record for each major choice, Terraform for the clusters and their cloud dependencies, the GitOps repository layout, the security baseline as code, runbooks for upgrades, scaling and disaster recovery, a cost model, and the audit report.
Tell us your platform, workloads and timeline. We will follow up with a scoped proposal.