Deciding between managing Kubernetes in-house or partnering with a managed service provider can be a difficult choice for organizations seeking to optimize their cloud infrastructure. Over the past several years at Fairwinds, I’ve been part of the decision to hire talent in-house or use a managed service provider (not for Kubernetes management, of course—that’s where our team shines the brightest!).
Most organizations make these types of decisions often, especially in areas such as payroll, graphic design, and accounting. Many factors go into the decision including our time and expertise to supervise the employee and the evolving needs of the business. When a skill is going to be long term strategic asset to our business, I nearly always choose to hire an internal expert to join our team.
When it comes to choosing to hire a service provider or in-house talent to drive your business forward, lean on these practical guidelines:
Another aspect to consider is whether you’re choosing between a managed service provider or a short-term consultant or project-based consulting agreement. Managed service providers typically have a vested interest in the sustained success of their clients because they offer ongoing support and optimization as part of a long-term contract. In contrast, some consultants may focus on short-term projects without a commitment to your organization’s long-term outcomes.
Managing cloud infrastructure is a bit like a band using a recording studio. While the band's unique music is their core product, the recording equipment and studio environment are essential tools that support the creation of the band’s music. However, mastering the intricacies of studio design or sound engineering could divert them from their primary focus—making music with their signature sound. Does every member of the band need to be a sound engineer to make good music? Definitely not.
Similarly, organizations should concentrate on building and differentiating their core services and consider outsourcing complex infrastructure management to specialists. Building, deploying, and maintaining cloud infrastructure isn’t what makes most companies money. They need the infrastructure, but not the in-house skills to build and manage it. In short, to maximize the chance of success, organizations should internalize functions that are central to their core competencies and outsource tasks that (while important) do not define their unique value proposition.
As businesses adopt Kubernetes or increase their K8s footprint, a common question is whether it makes sense build an in-house team (perhaps starting with hiring a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)) to manage Kubernetes or bring in a Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service (KaaS) provider.
Below are ten key questions to help guide your decision-making process.
If your primary business goal is building software products or delivering services, managing Kubernetes in-house might divert valuable resources from where they’re needed most. A managed service allows you to focus on your core business while experts handle Kubernetes operations. However, if infrastructure management is a strategic advantage (such as in a cloud monitoring SaaS company), having an SRE or an internal team might be worth the investment.
Kubernetes is complex, and hiring skilled professionals—like an SRE team—can be both challenging and expensive. If you already have DevOps engineers in-house who understand Kubernetes well, building an internal team might be fairly simple. On the other hand, if hiring or training your team on Kubernetes is a bottleneck, a managed Kubernetes provider can offer immediate expertise, reducing the learning curve and accelerating your deployments.
If your organization requires full control over networking, security, storage, and custom configurations, an in-house SRE team gives you the flexibility to fine-tune Kubernetes for your organization’s unique needs. A Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service provider, on the other hand, may remove some of the fine-grained control from your team.
Mission-critical applications require high availability and rapid disaster recovery capabilities. An experienced SRE can optimize performance, ensure redundancy, and set up incident response protocols tailored to your business, but particularly if you have a small SRE team, they’ll always be on call for infrastructure pages and they’ll be the go to person for everything infrastructure-related. Fairwinds Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service offers SLA-backed uptime guarantees and proactive monitoring, answering infrastructure-related pages 24/7.
An SRE’s salary can exceed $150K–$200K per year, not including benefits, tools, training, and additional operations support. Organizations should calculate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for both approaches, considering:
If your team needs to deploy Kubernetes rapidly, a managed service provider can deliver environments configured to align with Kubernetes best practices quickly, reducing the time to deployment considerably. In contrast, hiring an SRE and building an internal Kubernetes team requires time for recruitment, onboarding, and infrastructure setup. If speed is important, a managed service provider can accelerate your path to deploying production workloads.
Security is a top concern for Kubernetes environments because Kubernetes is not secure by default. If your organization operates in a regulated industry (finance, healthcare, and government to name just a few), compliance requirements may demand stricter control over configurations, access management, and logging.
An in-house SRE team provides full control over security policies. However, Fairwinds Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service ensures that security best practices are followed, including detection and remediation of security vulnerabilities, identity management, and more.
Kubernetes requires continuous monitoring and proactive issue resolution. An in-house SRE team can:
But in-house teams must also monitor, respond to, and resolve infrastructure alerts quickly.
Fairwinds provides 24/7 monitoring, ensuring rapid remediation without requiring you to have your internal talent take on-call pages for infrastructure.
If your organization intends to deploy Kubernetes across multiple cloud providers (AWS, GCP, and Azure) or in a hybrid-cloud setup, managing Kubernetes internally provides the flexibility to optimize workloads across different environments. That also means your internal team will need to know the details of each cloud service provider. Fairwinds Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service supports multi-cloud deployments, simplifying management by offering expertise for each provider.
Kubernetes is constantly maturing, requiring organizations to keep up with upgrades, security patches, and feature changes in K8s, related APIs, and add-ons. If your business requires long-term control and deep Kubernetes expertise, investing in an internal team makes sense.
However, if Kubernetes is a means to an end rather than a strategic focus, outsourcing management to a trusted provider ensures you always have access to up-to-date infrastructure without needing to stay ahead of Kubernetes advancements yourself.
The decision depends on your business goals, in-house expertise, and operational priorities.
Fairwinds Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service can accelerate your cloud adoption initiatives and help your team to get back to making great music (or building new apps and services, whichever is your passion).
