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: How the control plane components interact. How worker nodes register with the cluster. How Kubernetes networking behaves. How cloud integrations work. How traffic reaches workloads running inside the cluster. How operational failures surface during deployment and runtime. How production-style systems behave beneath managed abstractions. This article documents the architecture, implementation process, engineering decisions, operational lessons, and troubleshooting insights encountered during the effort to bring the platform to a healthy operational state. Project Objectives The primary objectives of this project were to: Provision infrastructure on AWS using Terraform. Bootstrap a self-managed Kubernetes cluster using kubeadm. Configure Kubernetes networking using Calico. Integrate Gateway API with AWS Load Balancer Controller. Expose workloads externally using AWS Application Load Balancers. Validate cluster functionality through application deployment. Understand the operational mechani