Building an Internal Developer Platform with EKS and GitOps
Learn how platform engineers can build an internal developer platform with Amazon EKS and Weave GitOps, to accelerate cloud-native adoption.
Further reading
Whitepaper: Best Practices for Hybrid Cloud Kubernetes with EKS and Weave GitOps
Whitepaper: Trusted Application Delivery: Continuous AWS Cloud Security with Weave GitOps
Kubernetes On-Premise - What You Need to Know
GitOps Beyond Kubernetes: Liquid Metal and EKS Anywhere Manage Hybrid Infrastructure Effortlessly
Weaveworks & AWS: Best Practices for Hybrid Cloud Kubernetes with EKS and Weave GitOps
In a recent webinar hosted by TechStrong Learning Experience, Weaveworks and AWS delivered an introduction and demo on “Building Internal Developer Platforms With EKS And GitOps.” In this webinar, we discussed how platform engineers can efficiently build an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) with Amazon EKS and Weave GitOps to accelerate cloud-native adoption and speed up the migration of existing applications to the cloud.
Darryl Weaver, Weaveworks Solution Architect, and Elamaran (Ela) Shanmugam, Sr. Containers Specialist Solutions Architect led the audience on the topics of developer platforms with Kubernetes, GitOps, EKS Blueprints, and more.
Accelerate your EKS Adoption with Weave GitOps
AWS and Weaveworks partner on technical advancements, especially for the EKS product suite. If you want to accelerate your EKS adoption and automation with GitOps - we can get you to a well-architected platform in just a few weeks.
Learn moreWhat is an Internal Developer Platform (IDP)?
Darryl Weaver kicks off the discussion by explaining what an internal developer platform (IDP) is:
“It's basically a way that a platform team can build what we call golden paths to enable developer self-service. This pretty much means that the platform team is the trailblazer and the application teams then follow in that trail. “
An (IDP) - also known as a self-service platform, or Kubernetes platform - is a set of standardized tools and technologies that enables development teams to self-service, offering convenient access to resources they need to create and deploy compliant code. It enables the separation of concerns for the Dev and Ops teams.
Organizations that adopt an IDP will have a dedicated platform team that is solely responsible for the creation and maintenance of the platform. The platform team defines a list of pre-vetted resources and templates - such as container registries, source code repositories, and access controls - for the developers to use.
The ultimate goal of an IDP is to make it easy for developers to interact with Kubernetes, and improve the developer experience and productivity across large teams.
Critical components of an IDP include:
- Infrastructure orchestration
- Role-based action management
- Application configuration management
- Deployment management
- Environment management
- Observability
Building an IDP with AWS EKS & Weave GitOps
The goal of this webinar is to demonstrate how to build an IDP with AWS EKS and Weave GitOps - utilizing EKS Blueprints Terraform Library of Examples and Weave GitOps Enterprise with an embedded Terraform Controller.
As a prelude to the demo, Ela introduced the Amazon EKS solution, shared some insights around Kubernetes adoption, and some of the Day 2 operational challenges. He then introduced EKS Blueprints and some real-life questions from existing customers. He explained there are two variants to the Blueprints: the Terraform variant and the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK). Darryl’s demo used the Terraform variant.

Figure: Example EKS Blueprints - Source
Key Moments in the Webinar
We know it’s not always easy to take 60 mins of your day to watch a webinar so we’ve made a note of all the key moments in the recording and they include:
- Amazon Web Service & Weaveworks Partnership [watch min: 4:22]
- What is an Internal Developer Platform (IDP)? [watch min: 5:22]
- Overview of Amazon EKS [watch min 7:22]
- EKS Blueprints [watch min 12:25]
- Why GitOps [watch min: 18:32]
- What is Weave GitOps and Weave GitOps Enterprise [watch min: 21:02]
- Terraform Controller [watch min: 23:06]
- EKS Blueprint Deployment Demo [watch min: 32:06]
- Q&A: [watch min 47:50]
Watch the webinar in its entirety here.
Build an IDP with EKS Accelerator Program
Weaveworks and AWS bring advanced Kubernetes application platforms to enterprises in the financial, technology, and telecommunication industries through the EKS accelerator program (available on AWS Marketplace) today. Our customers are reaping the benefits such as: increased productivity and deployment frequency, developer self service and overall reduction in friction between dev and ops teams.
Weaveworks is an AWS Technology Partner and can engage in an innovative, typically *cost neutral* way to help you run better, grow faster and do more as a software business - book a meeting to discuss details.
Watch the Webinar
The webinar is available to watch on-demand now and is about an hour long. So take a look today and see how platform engineers can build a developer platform with Amazon EKS and Weave GitOps.