Verified Technical
Deliveries & Architecture

An enterprise client operating mission-critical workloads in AWS GovCloud (US) on Amazon EKS required defense-in-depth cluster hardening. Because external internet egress was tightly restricted and GitHub Container Registry (GHCR) was unreachable, all upstream artifacts had to be securely mirrored, validated, and continuously verified against federal compliance baselines.

Workloads ran with unverified container images from external repositories. Several application pods ran with escalated privileges (HostPath, root user, host namespaces). Implementing admission webhooks in GovCloud faced regional STS authentication hurdles and 12-hour ECR token expirations.

apiVersion: kyverno.io/v1
kind: ClusterPolicy
metadata:
  name: enforce-signed-private-ecr
spec:
  validationFailureAction: Enforce
  background: false
  rules:
    - name: verify-cosign-signatures
      match:
        any:
          - resources:
              kinds: ["Pod"]
      verifyImages:
        - imageReferences:
            - "*.dkr.ecr.us-gov-west-1.amazonaws.com/*"
          attestors:
            - entries:
                - keys:
                    kms: "awskms:///arn:aws-us-gov:kms:us-gov-west-1:xxx:key/cosign-key"

100% of untrusted image deployments blocked at admission time. Clean CIS Kubernetes Benchmark pass with zero unverified containers entering GovCloud clusters.

A high-throughput distributed platform required strict isolation between application workloads and platform management tools. Production clusters previously operated with open pod-to-pod networking and unrestricted default internet egress.

CIDR filtering at the AWS Security Group level could not prevent exfiltration over standard ports (80/443). Blanket egress cuts risked breaking external APIs (Stripe, Twilio, external data warehouses) without prior telemetry.

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1beta1
kind: ServiceEntry
metadata:
  name: allow-external-apis
  namespace: istio-system
spec:
  hosts:
  - "api.external-warehouse.com"
  - "*.amazonaws.com"
  location: MESH_EXTERNAL
  ports:
  - number: 443
    name: https
    protocol: TLS
  resolution: DNS

All unapproved external requests blocked with zero silent exfiltration paths. 100% of egress traffic routed through monitored Envoy proxies with telemetry streamed into Grafana.

The client utilized Amazon EKS with standard node groups. System components like aws-node (VPC CNI) and application workloads executed under the shared EC2 instance profile, allowing any pod to invoke AWS API actions intended for system DaemonSets.

If an application container was compromised, attackers could leverage node IAM credentials to manipulate VPC interfaces. AWS KMS keys possessed monolithic policies where administrative roles could decrypt confidential data without separation.

Node IAM roles decoupled from workload identity. Cryptographic separation of duties enforced across KMS keys with full CloudTrail audit attribution.

Staging and production clusters were maintained across separate AWS accounts. Helm charts contained hardcoded node-group names and unmanaged secrets, resulting in deployments failing whenever pushed to secondary clusters.

Simultaneous node group terminations broke both the GitOps controller and Kyverno webhooks, preventing corrective deployments from applying due to admission webhook timeout loops.

The same declarative Helm charts deploy cleanly across primary and DR clusters. Cluster bootstrap reduced from days of manual setup to 35-minute automated GitOps reconciliation.

A high-volume healthcare cloud platform required deep observability to diagnose microservice latency spikes and pod scheduling anomalies across disjointed tools without trace correlation.

Because the platform processed sensitive health data, query parameters risked leaking into log indices, creating HIPAA violations. Storage costs for raw logs were growing exponentially.

Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) dropped from 45 minutes to under 8 minutes (~82% improvement). 100% HIPAA-compliant redacted logging streams with full developer visibility.