Deploying Microservices on AWS EKS: A Step-by-Step Guide

Microservices are like building blocks for modern apps – instead of creating one big chunk of code, you break your application into smaller, independent services. This makes apps easier to scale, update, and manage. But here’s the catch: running many small services means you now have to figure out how they talk to each other, how to deploy them efficiently, and how to keep everything running smoothly.

That’s where Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) steps in. EKS is a fully managed Kubernetes service that takes care of the heavy lifting — from setting up the cluster to handling scaling and security — so you can focus on building and shipping features.

In this blog, we’ll walk you through how to deploy microservices on AWS EKS. From setting up your cluster to managing traffic, debugging, and monitoring — we’ve got you covered!

Introduction: Why EKS for Microservices?

Imagine a company with separate departments — HR, Engineering, Marketing — each handling a specific role. Microservices work the same way: they break down your app into smaller, independent parts that can be developed, deployed, and scaled individually. This speeds up development and improves fault isolation.

But managing many services requires solid coordination — just like departments need shared tools and processes. That’s where Kubernetes comes in, handling scheduling, scaling, and communication.

Now, enter Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) – a managed Kubernetes service from AWS that takes care of the operational overhead for you. EKS handles things like:

• Cluster upgrades and high availability, so your infrastructure stays up-to-date and resilient,
• Security, through smooth integration with AWS IAM,
• Networking, by plugging into VPC for private communication between services,
• Load balancing via ALB (Application Load Balancer),
• And monitoring/logging through CloudWatch.

Setting Up an AWS EKS Cluster

Before you deploy your microservices, you need a place for them to live — a home base. That’s your EKS cluster. Setting it up might sound intimidating at first, but with the right tools, it’s more like assembling IKEA furniture with step-by-step instructions.

1. What You’ll Need (Prerequisites):

• AWS CLI: This is your remote control to talk to AWS.
• kubectl: Think of this as your walkie-talkie to communicate with the Kubernetes cluster.
• eksctl: This is your setup wizard – it handles most of the EKS setup for you.

Make sure all three are installed and configured on your machine.

2. Creating the Cluster:

Now, run this command in your terminal:

Here You’re telling AWS:

• “Hey, I want a Kubernetes cluster called microservices-cluster.”
• “Use version 1.27 of Kubernetes.”
• “Put it in the us-west-2 region.”
• “Give me 3 medium-powered worker nodes to run my services.”

These worker nodes are like little factories that will run your microservices. They’re deployed in a VPC (a secure network), with all the right roles and security rules in place.

Once the cluster is ready, verify it:

If everything seems good, you’ll see your three worker nodes listed. Boom! You’ve just set up your own Kubernetes playground — ready to start deploying microservices.

Configuring Service Mesh for Communication

In microservices architecture, services often need to communicate with each other — but you want those conversations to be secure, reliable, and well-monitored. Instead of every team building its own communication tools, you bring in a central communication system that handles it all — that’s what a service mesh does for your microservices.  A service mesh like Istio or Linkerd enhances this communication layer by managing traffic, securing service-to-service communication, and enabling observability.

1. Installing Istio:

2. Enable automatic sidecar injection:

With this setup, all pods in the default namespace will include an Envoy proxy sidecar, enabling features like:

• Smart traffic routing and retries
• End-to-end encryption between services (mTLS)
• Monitoring with metrics and logs, and traces

By offloading communication responsibilities to the service mesh, your services stay focused on what they do best — while Istio ensures they talk securely and efficiently.

Deploying Microservices with Helm and Cloud Launchpad

Think of Helm as the “package manager” for Kubernetes — kind of like how you use apt or pip to install software. With Helm, you can bundle all your Kubernetes resources (Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, etc.) into a reusable and version-controlled package called a Helm chart.

Let’s say you’ve got a user-service microservice. Instead of manually writing and applying multiple YAML files, you just run:

Helm handles the heavy lifting — making deployments consistent, easy to roll back, and much simpler to manage across environments.

But when you’re dealing with many microservices, things can get overwhelming fast. That’s where Cloud Launchpad steps in.

That’s where Cloud Launchpad becomes a game-changer. It’s a DevOps automation platform built to handle your entire project deployment — from zero to running in production — with minimal effort.

Whether you’re starting from source code or using a pre-built container, Cloud Launchpad has you covered. Here’s what it automates for you:

• Generates Dockerfiles for your app
• Spins up EKS clusters with the right configuration
• Creates and applies Helm charts for Kubernetes resources
•  Provisions EC2 instances and Load Balancers
• Deploys everything — either from source or from a ready-made container
• Integrates CI/CD pipelines for smooth updates

In short, it’s like giving developers a “Deploy to EKS” button. You don’t need to be a Kubernetes expert — even app developers can deploy full projects with confidence, speed, and security.

Managing Traffic with AWS Load Balancer & Ingress

Imagine your microservices are like different shops in a mall. You need a smart entrance system that knows which shop (i.e., service) a customer (i.e., request) wants to go to — that’s what Ingress does in Kubernetes.

To make this work smoothly on AWS, we use the AWS Load Balancer Controller. It connects Kubernetes Ingress resources with AWS Application Load Balancers (ALB) or Network Load Balancers (NLB) — so your services can be accessed from the internet.

1. Install AWS Load Balancer Controller:

You can install it via Helm and configure the IAM roles for your cluster nodes. Once set up, your cluster can spin up ALBs automatically for your Ingress resources.

2. Example Ingress YAML:

Here’s an example that routes traffic to the user-service:

With Ingress and ALB, you can:

• Route traffic based on path or domain (like /users or api.myapp.com)
• Terminate SSL using AWS Certificate Manager
• Use WAF for added protection

Monitoring and Debugging in Production

Once your services are live, keeping an eye on their health is critical. You don’t want users telling you something broke — you want to know before they do. Without proper monitoring and logging, issues can be hard to detect and resolve.

1. Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana:

Set up Prometheus for collecting logs and Grafana for visualizing them:

Grafana provides dashboards for CPU, memory, and custom metrics. Istio also integrates seamlessly to provide service-level metrics and traces.

2. Logging with Loki and Promtail:

For logs, pair Loki (by Grafana) with Promtail, which collects logs from your pods:This makes it easy to search through logs when debugging issues.

3. AWS CloudWatch Integration:

EKS supports CloudWatch Container Insights out of the box — giving you logs and metrics in the AWS Console. Set up alerts to stay ahead of problems.

4. Debugging Tips:

• kubectl logs <pod> — view logs from a pod
• kubectl exec -it <pod> — /bin/sh — jump inside a container for live debugging
• Use readiness/liveness probes in your deployments to automatically restart broken containers

Conclusion: Best Practices for Scalable Microservices

Deploying microservices on AWS EKS opens the door to high scalability, resilience, and modern cloud-native architecture — but to truly harness its power, following best practices is key.

• Use Namespaces to separate environments (dev, staging, prod)
• Limit Resources with CPU/memory quotas and enable Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA)
• Secure Services using IAM roles for service accounts and mTLS via service mesh
• Apply GitOps principles for version-controlled deployments
• Centralize Monitoring with Grafana, Loki, and CloudWatch for actionable insights

By combining AWS EKS with Helm, service mesh, and tools like CloudLaunchpad, teams can confidently build and manage robust microservices architectures.