Building and Operating a Production-Style Kubernetes Platform on AWS Using kubeadm

Introduction Managed Kubernetes platforms such as Amazon EKS, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) abstract away much of the operational complexity involved in running Kubernetes clusters. While this significantly improves developer productivity, it also hides many of the internal systems responsible for cluster orchestration, networking, node registration, and workload scheduling. As a result, many engineers interact with Kubernetes daily without fully understanding the components that keep a cluster operational behind the scenes. To better understand Kubernetes from an operational perspective, I set out to build and operate a self-managed Kubernetes platform on AWS using kubeadm. Unlike lightweight local environments such as Minikube or kind, kubeadm bootstraps Kubernetes in a way that closely resembles how real-world self-managed clusters are provisioned and operated. The objective of this project was not simply to install Kubernetes, but to explore