Fandor wanted to move to Kubernetes, but because its needs and DevOps load varied, it would have been too expensive to hire a full-time DevOps team. And while they wanted to go with Kubernetes, they weren’t sure how to pull it off at first. The solution was Fairwinds people-led Managed Kubernetes.
Fandor is a subscription-based streaming service for indie films, documentaries and international features and shorts. While Fandor’s legacy Ruby-on-Rails application was fine for a small startup, they experienced scalability issues when they began including original programming in their offering. Load testing confirmed that their infrastructure couldn’t handle the increased volume. As a result, they spent a lot of time patching problems.
Fandor leadership wanted to invest in the company’s future, and their team of Ruby and JavaScript engineers had long been talking about containerization. They identified the performance improvements and efficiencies they were looking to gain, then decided to make a radical change from a monolithic application infrastructure to a containerized infrastructure.
Because their needs and DevOps load varied, it would have been too expensive for their growing company to hire a full-time DevOps team. And while they wanted to go with Kubernetes, they weren’t sure how to pull it off at first. The solution was Fairwinds Managed Kubernetes.
It used to be white-knuckle time when Fandor did a release. Not anymore. Within 2.5 months, Fandor began the migration process of a legacy monolithic application infrastructure to three new code bases and a brand new architecture. Fairwinds designed and monitored a solid system, which instilled confidence in Fandor’s team and freed up their engineers to focus on other business-facing initiatives.
At one point, Fandor’s cluster encountered problems. Fairwinds was able to rebuild the infrastructure on new hardware within hours with no outages. The scaling worked the way it was designed, making it an example of how the infrastructure is serving Fandor’s day-to-day needs.
Fairwinds laid down a solid infrastructure, and now Fandor is building on top of it. Fandor is now in the process of implementing new administration features and migrating their entire video streaming service onto Kubernetes. In the future, Fandor will be migrating their iOS, Android, Apple TV, Android TV, Roku and others apps on smart TVs.
In the past, Fandor had had other third-party engagements, so they were initially skeptical about working with [Fairwinds]. However, they came to trust [Fairwinds] to reliably manage and monitor their infrastructure. Fandor made choices based on their specific business challenges and chose the right tool – Kubernetes – and partner – Fairwinds.
“In the past, we did as much firefighting as product design and innovation. Fairwinds changed all that. Their responsiveness has been phenomenal. Our team now gets to focus on the development work they want to be doing. From my perspective, it’s all about who you surround yourself with. From the start, Fairwinds' service and responsiveness have been phenomenal. We’re impressed.”
Michael Tuszynski, CTO at Fandor
