Production-Ready AWS EKS with Terraform, GitOps, DevSecOps & FinOps

Spinning up a textbook production Kubernetes cluster on AWS is deceptively expensive.

Between the Amazon EKS control plane ($73.00/month), redundant multi-AZ NAT Gateways ($65.70/month), On-Demand EC2 worker nodes ($60.74/month), and cross-AZ data transfer fees, an idle baseline cluster can easily burn $240.00/month before serving a single real user.

Worse, once a team starts shipping Terraform changes through Pull Requests, a single unreviewed instance resize or additional NAT Gateway can increase the monthly AWS bill overnight.

In Part 1 of the CloudPulse series , I built a hardened, non-root FastAPI chaos microservice and a shift-left DevSecOps pipeline that eliminated 3 HIGH-severity container CVEs before publishing the verified image to GHCR.

In Part 2, I built the production AWS landing zone, FinOps cost-governance gate, Argo CD GitOps controller, and Prometheus/Grafana observability stack to run that container in production.

The…