How to Migrate from Red Hat OpenShift to Amazon EKS and Cut Licensing Costs

Migrating from Red Hat OpenShift to Amazon EKS can eliminate OpenShift’s per-core subscription costs, though organizations must still pay for EKS control planes, underlying AWS compute, observability, registries, CI/CD, and any replacement platform engineering work. The migration primarily involves converting OpenShift-specific resources such as DeploymentConfigs, Routes, ImageStreams, BuildConfigs, SecurityContextConstraints, projects, and oc-based workflows to Kubernetes Deployments, Ingress or Gateway APIs, Amazon ECR, external CI pipelines, Pod Security Admission, namespaces with RBAC, and kubectl. A key technical risk is container images that rely on OpenShift’s arbitrary UID security model, which may fail on EKS unless they are made explicitly non-root and compatible with appropriate filesystem permissions. The recommended approach is a parallel, phased migration that inventories workloads and operators, establishes an EKS landing zone, pilots a stateless application, validates measurable performance and reliability criteria, migrates build systems, moves stateful services last, and aligns decommissioning with Red Hat renewal dates. Because EKS provides Kubernetes rather than OpenShift’s integrated developer console, builds, GitOps, monitoring, registry, and tenancy features, teams must either assemble and operate alternatives such as Argo CD, Backstage, Helm, and Prometheus tooling, adopt an internal developer platform, or consider ROSA if retaining the managed OpenShift experience is more important than removing its service fees.

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