How I Containerised 5 Monoliths and Deployed Them to EKS

There's a blog post I've always found frustrating: the kind that shows you a perfect Dockerfile, a clean terraform apply , and a screenshot of everything working on the first try. No errors. No wrong turns. This isn't that post. I'm a DevOps and Cloud Engineer — in practice, I do DevOps and SRE work: Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD pipelines, AWS infrastructure. I containerise things regularly. But I'd never sat down and worked through five different stacks back to back, treating each one as a distinct challenge. So I did. Here's what I built, what broke, and what I learned. The Setup Five demo apps. Each represents a different monolith archetype. Each has a /health endpoint and one meaningful route — simple enough that the app isn't the distraction. AI helped with creating the apps so I could focus on the DevOps aspects of the project. App Stack What it teaches app-node-api Node.js + Express node_modules , .dockerignore discipline app-python-api Python + Flask Slim vs Alpine tradeoffs app-