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. And it’s not always visible upfront.…