Kubernetes platform baseline
A baseline EKS platform with namespace-per-team isolation, autoscaling and resource governance configured from day one.
The problem
Clusters set up quickly to 'just get something running' tend to lack resource limits, RBAC boundaries and autoscaling — all of which are painful to retrofit once real workloads depend on the cluster. This lab establishes that baseline before workloads arrive.
Architecture
- Namespace-per-team structure with RBAC and network policy boundaries
- Node autoscaling driven by real workload demand rather than fixed node groups
- Default resource requests and limits enforced through admission policy
- Ingress and cert management configured as shared, versioned platform infrastructure
Technologies
Design decisions
Namespace-per-team over one shared namespace
Makes RBAC, resource quotas and network policy boundaries explicit instead of implicit and easy to violate accidentally.
Admission policy to enforce resource requests, rather than relying on convention
Conventions get skipped under deadline pressure; policy enforcement doesn't.
Lessons learned
- Resource governance is far easier to introduce before teams have workloads running than after
- Autoscaling tuned against synthetic load rarely matches real traffic — it needs revisiting after real usage data exists
Working through something similar?
This lab reflects our own reference work, not a client engagement — but the approach transfers directly.
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