I currently run two environments: development on EC2 and production on EKS. Because the infrastructure differs, it creates extra management work and makes it harder to test production changes before deployment. I could create a UAT or staging EKS environment for load testing and release preparation, but the added cost is becoming a concern. The clients originally requested that setup and are now questioning the bill. Production uses EKS because we expect to run multiple applications in the same cluster and rely on Kubernetes for scaling and deployments. What would be a practical, cost-conscious way to manage these environments while keeping development close enough to production for reliable testing?
5 Answers
The hardest part is usually not matching the compute infrastructure; it is creating safe, representative data. Keep development data intentionally limited and sanitized, and avoid copying a large production dataset unless the test requires it. That can reduce both storage and runtime costs while still giving developers useful coverage.
The environments should ideally use the same underlying platform, with development and staging scaled down and made more disposable. If EKS is the right choice for production, the EKS control-plane cost for another environment is relatively small compared with the engineering time spent maintaining two completely different setups. If that cost is unacceptable, it may be worth reconsidering whether EKS is justified for production at all.
For a low-cost Kubernetes-like development setup, tools such as k3s or k0s can provide a closer local or small-server experience than plain EC2. Just be careful not to create another platform that differs in important ways from EKS. The application packaging and deployment automation should remain the same, and any EKS-specific behavior still needs to be tested in an actual EKS environment.
You do not necessarily need to keep a full staging cluster running all the time. Automate the environment creation, deploy the application and required test data, run the performance or release tests, and then tear it down. That limits the cost to the time the environment is actually being used. For normal development, use a smaller cluster or a lightweight Kubernetes distribution while keeping the deployment process and application configuration the same.
A smaller development environment is fine, but it should be structurally similar to production. Use the same container images, Kubernetes manifests or Helm charts, networking assumptions, deployment workflow, and observability approach. The main differences should be replica counts, resource limits, and the amount of data loaded—not the entire execution platform.
Exactly. Saving a relatively small infrastructure charge can easily cost more in troubleshooting and maintenance when development behaves differently from production.