Replatforming Airbyte: From Developer Laptop to EKS
originally posted at LinkedIn at July 25, 2025
In early-stage engineering teams, it's natural for tools to start out simple — often running on a single developer machine, just to get things moving. That’s how our Airbyte setup began: quick to spin up, good enough for testing connectors, and easy to iterate on.
But as our team grew and data pipelines became more embedded in how we operated, we knew it was time to treat Airbyte like real infrastructure. That meant moving beyond local environments and into a scalable, secure, and repeatable deployment.
We migrated Airbyte OSS to Amazon EKS, using Helm and AWS-native services like S3 and IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA). Our goal wasn’t to fix something broken, but to build on what was working and make it production-ready—without sacrificing developer velocity.
This post shares how we did it, what we learned, and what you might want to consider if you’re operationalizing Airbyte (or any similar open-source tool) in a small but growing cloud-native team.
