Equinix's Shared Services Architecture on Amazon EKS for Operational Efficiency

Equinix, a global digital infrastructure company, faced significant operational challenges managing numerous independent Kubernetes clusters on Amazon EC2. This decentralized ownership led to "operational sprawl," where individual application teams managed their own cluster lifecycles, configurations, and operational patterns, resulting in inconsistent governance, duplicated infrastructure, and a lack of shared services. This case study highlights their strategic shift to a shared services architecture on Amazon EKS to overcome these issues.

The Problem: Decentralized Kubernetes Management

Before migrating to Amazon EKS, Equinix operated a self-managed Kubernetes environment where teams provisioned and managed their own etcd, control plane, and worker nodes. While offering initial flexibility, this model introduced several structural problems:

• Operational sprawl: Duplicated infrastructure and inconsistent operational baselines across teams.
• No centralized governance: Difficulty enforcing network isolation, security policies, and deployment standards.
• Lack of shared services model: Common needs like CI/CD, observability, and data services were solved independently, leading to redundancy.
• Cluster lifecycle complexity: Upgrading and patching multiple self-managed control planes introduced compounding risks.

Solution: Multi-Account Shared Services Architecture on Amazon EKS

Equinix adopted a "North Star architecture" built on Amazon EKS with a multi-account strategy to centralize infrastructure ownership under a cloud operations team, allowing application teams to focus solely on business services. This architecture separates concerns across three core AWS accounts:

1. Workloads Account (Workloads-VPC): Hosts all application services on Amazon EKS. Utilizes Application Load Balancers (ALB) with Kubernetes Gateway API for traffic ingress and Cilium as the CNI for pod-level network isolation and Hubble for observability.
2. Platform Account (Platform-VPC): Owned by the cloud operations team, it houses shared infrastructure services. This includes managed data services (Amazon RDS, MSK, OpenSearch Service, MQ, S3), CI/CD infrastructure (GitHub Runners as EKS workloads), and other shared capabilities. Network Load Balancers (NLB) handle ingress.
3. Network Account (Network-VPC): Acts as the connectivity hub. It implements an AWS Transit Gateway architecture spanning multiple regions for cross-account connectivity, Amazon Route 53 Resolver for DNS, and AWS Direct Connect Gateway for hybrid connectivity to on-premises networks.

Impact and Key Takeaways

The migration resulted in significant operational improvements: 40% reduction in operational overhead, 4x increase in deployment frequency, and 100% unified architecture adoption across business units. Additionally, enhanced developer productivity through standardized CI/CD, improved observability with Hubble, strengthened security posture via account and network isolation, and accelerated onboarding times were achieved. The core takeaway is that consolidating operational ownership onto a well-architected, managed infrastructure significantly boosts innovation pace by freeing application teams from undifferentiated heavy lifting.