EKS Platform Engineering

Platform Engineering

1. Internal Developer Portals (IDP) & Backstage In a large company, a developer might not know where their logs are, who owns a service, or how to create a new API. Backstage (the open-source framework from Spotify) acts as the “Front Door” for your developers.

• The Software Catalog: A “Phonebook” for every microservice, API, and library in your company.
• Software Templates: A “Scaffolding” tool. A developer clicks “Create New Service,” and Backstage automatically creates the GitHub repo, the EKS namespace, and the CI/CD pipeline.

2. Virtual Clusters (vcluster): The Developer Sandbox Creating a full EKS cluster for every developer is expensive and slow. Giving everyone their own namespace is better, but developers can’t change cluster-wide settings (like CRDs) in a shared namespace. vcluster solves this by running a virtual Kubernetes cluster inside a single namespace of your host EKS cluster.

• Isolation: To the developer, it looks and feels like a real, private admin-access cluster.
• Efficiency: It shares the host’s worker nodes, so it costs almost nothing when idle.

3. Crossplane: Infrastructure as Code (the K8s way) For years, we used Terraform to create S3 buckets and RDS databases. But Terraform is a “Push” tool (it runs and then stops). Crossplane turns your EKS cluster into a Universal Control Plane.

• You define an AWS RDS database using a Kubernetes YAML file (kind: RDSInstance).
• Crossplane “watches” that YAML. If someone manually deletes the database in the AWS Console, Crossplane (like a true K8s controller) will instantly recreate it.