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3-Tier Application on Amazon EKS with RDS

EKSALBRDSNAT GatewayVPC
3-Tier Application on Amazon EKS with RDS

Use Case

Production-grade web application running containerized frontend and backend workloads on EKS, with a managed relational database in an isolated data tier.

Design Decisions

  • ▸ALB sits in the public subnet — all compute remains in private subnets
  • ▸NAT Gateway allows pods to pull images and reach external APIs without public IPs
  • ▸EKS Control Plane is fully managed by AWS — no master node overhead
  • ▸RDS is isolated in a dedicated data tier, reachable only from backend pods
  • ▸EKS manages both frontend and backend pods via the same control plane

Trade-offs

  • –Higher cost than a single-subnet setup due to NAT Gateway and ALB
  • –Increased complexity vs. a simple EC2 deployment — justified for teams needing scalability and resilience

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