The first time things broke in production, I didn’t even know where to look.

Not “figuratively lost.” I mean literally.

Pods were restarting. Logs were half there. Metrics were… somewhere.

And I was SSH’ing into nodes like it was 2016, trying to understand why a simple Node.js service decided to disappear mid traffic.

That was the moment I quietly said to myself:

“Maybe choosing EKS wasn’t the flex I thought it was.”

A few months earlier, the decision felt obvious.

We were starting fresh. New service. Decent traffic expectations. Nothing massive, but not trivial either.

Someone asked:

“ECS or EKS?”

And I jumped in a bit too quickly:

“Let’s go with Kubernetes. Future proof. Industry standard.”

That word future proof has cost me time more than once.

What I thought I was choosing

At the time, I framed it like this:

ECS → simple, but limiting

EKS → powerful, flexible, scalable

So naturally… I chose “powerful.”

What I didn’t realize then is:

Power comes with a tax.…