Migrating from Self-Managed Kubernetes to Amazon EKS

Running your own Kubernetes control plane on EC2 made sense once. Over time, the upgrades, etcd backups, certificate rotations, and 2 a.m. control-plane incidents add up to a real operational tax. Amazon EKS moves that undifferentiated heavy lifting to AWS while leaving you in control of your workloads. Here is how a migration from self-managed Kubernetes to EKS actually goes.

Why teams move to EKS

• AWS runs the control plane. No more patching, scaling, or backing up etcd yourself.
• Tighter AWS integration. IAM roles for service accounts, VPC networking, load balancers, and CloudWatch work the way AWS intends.
• A managed upgrade path. Kubernetes ships releases often; EKS makes staying current far less painful.
• Less on-call surface. Most of the pages that came from control-plane problems simply go away.

Before you migrate: take inventory

Map what you actually run before moving anything:

• Workloads, namespaces, and their resource requests.
• Ingress controllers, load balancers, and DNS.
• Storage: what uses persistent volumes, and which storage classes.
• Secrets and how they are managed.
• Cluster add-ons: monitoring, logging, cert management, service mesh.

A migration is a good moment to drop the add-ons you no longer use.

Build the target on EKS

Stand up the new cluster as infrastructure as code with Terraform or eksctl, so it is reproducible and reviewable:

• Private networking with a well-planned VPC and subnets.
• Managed node groups, or Karpenter for right-sized, on-demand nodes.
• IAM Roles for Service Accounts so pods get least-privilege AWS access without static keys.
• The AWS Load Balancer Controller for ingress, and EBS or EFS CSI drivers for storage.

Move the workloads with GitOps

The cleanest migrations are declarative. Put your manifests and Helm charts in Git and let a GitOps tool such as ArgoCD reconcile them onto the new cluster. That gives you a repeatable, auditable path and an easy way to promote changes across environments. Migrate namespace by namespace rather than all at once.

Cut over without downtime

For stateless services, run both clusters in parallel and shift traffic gradually at DNS or the load balancer, watching error rates and latency as you go. For stateful services, plan data replication and a maintenance window if a brief pause is unavoidable. Keep the old cluster warm until the new one has proven itself under real traffic, then decommission it.

Validate before you delete anything

• Confirm autoscaling behaves under load.
• Check that monitoring, logging, and alerts fire as expected.
• Test a restore from backup on the new cluster.
• Review IAM and network policies for least privilege.

What good looks like

Done well, an EKS migration lowers operational load and often improves both cost and performance at the same time. On a recent healthcare platform move to Amazon EKS, we cut cloud costs by roughly 35% and brought API latency down substantially while keeping the service available throughout.

We handle these migrations end to end as an AWS Advanced Tier Partner, including containerization, CI/CD, and low-downtime cutover. If you are weighing a move to EKS, book a free audit, or read more about Amazon EKS, our Kubernetes and EKS work, and cloud migration.