The Production-Readiness Checklist for Amazon EKS

A cluster that runs a demo is not a cluster that survives production. Use this checklist before you route real traffic to Amazon EKS.

Security

• IRSA for pod-level IAM, no node-wide credentials
• Network policies and least-privilege security groups
• Pod Security Standards enforced via admission control
• Image scanning in CI and at admission; signed images

Reliability & scaling

• Multi-AZ node groups and PodDisruptionBudgets
• Karpenter or Cluster Autoscaler tuned with sane limits
• Resource requests/limits set; no noisy-neighbour risk
• Tested cluster upgrade and rollback runbook

Day-2 operations

Production readiness is mostly about what happens after go-live: observability with SLOs, an on-call rotation that trusts the alerts, backup/restore that has actually been tested, and GitOps so every change is reviewable and reversible. If any of these is missing, you are not production-ready yet.