For one education technology company, the journey to Kubernetes began out of necessity. Originally, the company relied on Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) as a cornerstone of its operational strategy. Increasingly, however, its vendors began requiring the use of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) instances. Despite a commitment to cutting edge technology delivered in the cloud, it became increasingly challenging for them to manage and optimize the growing Kubernetes infrastructure. The in-house technology team wanted to focus on educational services, but Kubernetes management was getting in the way.
As the company grew and third party vendors began requiring the use of Kubernetes, the ed tech team found that each vendor had unique requirements. This made it more difficult to manage the deployment and scaling of services without introducing more complexity and issues with maintaining consistency in the Kubernetes environment. In addition, while the in-house platform and engineering teams had considerable technical knowledge and skills, it was primarily related to Amazon ECS, not EKS. That made it harder to manage diverse vendor requirements, particularly as the team didn’t think it made sense to hire more staff with EKS expertise or train existing staff on Kubernetes.
Learning about, maintaining, and updating Kubernetes was stealing time away from internal teams, making it difficult to develop new capabilities in their services and find other ways to differentiate their solutions. In addition, the teams were having difficulty integrating Kubernetes into the existing CI/CD pipelines, making the entire problem even more frustrating. The team felt like they were spending all their time navigating the ins and outs of Kubernetes instead of advancing their mission-critical technology.
Frustrated with these multifaceted challenges, the EdTech company looked for a way to get back to what they loved doing. They turned to Fairwinds to implement a fully managed EKS solution that included cluster set up, configuration, monitoring, and ongoing optimization. Fairwinds’ Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service provides far more than EKS or other cloud managed Kubernetes offerings do because it’s a people-led service. That means that it operates as an extension of the internal tech team, bringing with it combined decades of Kubernetes expertise learned from managing Kubernetes for many clients across diverse infrastructures.
Now, the EdTech team can turn to Fairwinds to learn about best practices and how to more effectively leverage Kubernetes. This reduces the operational burden on in-house resources, allowing the company’s engineers to focus on building and enhancing their vital educational services. Fairwinds also worked to integrate Kubernetes into the company’s existing development workflows and tools, improving deployment velocity and reliability.
Anyone who tells you that it’s quick and easy to deploy a production-ready Kubernetes environment for your specific needs is being less than transparent about the complexity involved in getting everything running just right. Fairwinds worked with this EdTech partner to comprehensively review the existing infrastructure and workflow and discuss the unique challenges and objectives for working together. As a result, Fairwinds was able to customize the cluster design and configuration to meet the specific operational needs and scalability requirements of the company.
Once Fairwinds integrated Kubernetes into the company’s existing CI/CD pipelines, deployments were automated and proceeded smoothly, without the headaches the team had been struggling with. In addition, Fairwinds now provides ongoing management and optimization services, ensuring that the infrastructure’s performance is tuned, that security for the Kubernetes environment is monitored and all vulnerabilities or misconfigurations are addressed quickly, and that the company’s cloud spend is optimized. This close partnership ensures that the EdTech company can focus on its mission and deliver its services on production-grade Kubernetes.
The technical expertise and strategic partnership with this client are just one example of how people-led managed Kubernetes services can enable organizations to focus on their long-term goals instead of Kubernetes management. The Fairwinds team are people who care about Managed Kubernetes clients and their successes. Through research, expertise, and a commitment to working in partnership with its clients, Fairwinds not only resolves immediate Kubernetes challenges but also contributes to the strategic growth and operational excellence of its clients.
Learn why other businesses chose Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service and how they’ve benefited by partnering with Fairwinds.
