Orchestrating Secure AI Agents on Amazon EKS

Subtitle: How we went from scaling video analysis on EKS to running autonomous coding agents in a custom agent harness, and why Kubernetes was the obvious choice. The backstory A couple of years ago, AWS published a case study about how our team at Unitary scales Amazon EKS with Karpenter. Three engineers managing 1,000+ nodes at peak, processing 26 million videos a day, 50-70% cost reduction with Spot Instances. It was a good story about what a small team can do with the right infrastructure. What that case study didn't cover is what happened next. As our engineering team grew, we started leaning heavily on AI coding agents (Cursor, then Claude Code and OpenAI Codex) to keep pace with development across multiple customer projects. And we hit a wall that will be familiar to anyone running these tools at scale. The problem with AI coding agents in production If you've used Claude Code or Codex, you know the experience: the agent is powerful, but it needs you there. You're approving tool