Just as Kubernetes itself has grown and evolved, so has Fairwinds. For the last five years, I've been involved in delivering Kubernetes infrastructure to our customers in a lot of different ways. Originally, we were focused primarily on services. When I first began my journey, the company was still called ReactiveOps, and I was a member of a 4-person "pod" (I know, I know) that was responsible for running about a dozen clusters for a handful of clients. This service was extremely high-touch and exposed me and my fellow pod members to a lot of really interesting problems — really fast.
As I’ve mentioned before, Kubernetes is extremely complex, and there are a lot of different ways to configure it. To address the complexity issues, we began to tackle the problem from multiple directions. Technologically, we had to develop tooling and processes that would make our diverse customer infrastructure more similar. We wanted to reduce the cognitive load on individual site reliability engineers (SREs) supporting a large number of clients/clusters and make providing services more consistent. This, in turn, helped us be more responsive to customers, and increase the overall reliability and availability of their Kubernetes environments.
Using our own expertise and experience with managing diverse Kubernetes environments, we began building open source projects to help address some of the problems we consistently saw in customer environments. Some of our projects include:
Most recently, we introduced Base Image Finder, which helps you identify base images to detect which base images were used to build the container and whether a new one is available. We have even more open source projects we’ve created to help address issues we’ve seen in customer environments and shared with the community to contribute to and use.
To better manage multiple clusters and teams at scale, we created Fairwinds Insights, software for platform engineers to standardize Kubernetes. We did this because even with great open source projects and tools, you need the ability to configure those consistently across Kubernetes. Insights helps us better serve our managed services customers and to provide a platform for others to use if they choose to manage it themselves. Insights is available in a few tiers, including a free tier, to offer the full suite of Insights that meets the needs of a diverse customer base.
We recently adjusted our services to align with the needs of small startups and enterprises alike. While our previous model was more constrained, we now provide a highly flexible model that meets each customer’s individual needs.
Our goal is to meet our customers where they’re at in their Kubernetes journeys. We do this by running rock-solid Kubernetes infrastructure backed by our years of experience and first-class software. That leaves you free to focus on the needs of your business.
Learn more about our managed Kubernetes services.
