Migrating from GKE to EKS with Linkerd

Migrating from Google’s Kubernetes offering to Amazon’s managed Kubernetes service is one of the most significant challenges a platform team can tackle. Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd (BEL) can dramatically simplify this migration process and help ensure your services stay reliable, secure, and observable throughout the migration—and beyond.

Linkerd’s powerful multicluster communication capabilities allow you to incrementally move services from GKE to EKS, without requiring code changes or interrupting developer workflows, and roll back instantly if something goes wrong during the process. Every connection is encrypted and authenticated with mTLS.

Linkerd automatically encrypts and authenticates every TCP connection without application changes or additional configuration, and provides powerful zero-trust authorization policies. For teams with regulatory requirements such as FedRAMP, CMMC, FISMA, or HIPAA, Linkerd allows you to implement FIPS-validated encryption and to simplify audits with a dedicated FIPS dashboard with real-time proof of encryption and visibility into CMVP numbers.

For new AWS adopters, cross-zone traffic charges can be an unpleasant surprise, sometimes amounting to six figures annually—or more! Linkerd’s High Availability Zonal Load Balancing (HAZL) capability can eliminate these charges for multi-zone EKS clusters without affecting overall reliability. See how Imagine Learning is on track to reduce regional data transfer networking costs by at least 40%.

Linkerd allows you to create a secure and highly reliable platform on top of EKS through best practices like:

• Spanning multi-region and AZs
• Encrypting all traffic with mTLS
• Fine-tuning zero-trust authorization policies
• Implementing traffic management with retries, rate limiting, and circuit breaking
• Uniform observability across every pod, service, and cluster

Linkerd is trusted by top enterprises running AWS for their most critical workloads. It integrates natively with the AWS services your team already uses and can be easily accessed through the AWS marketplace.

Check out our guide to migrating to Amazon EKS to help you get started.