Decisio Health chose Fairwinds Insights, Kubernetes security and governance software, to bolster security and improve resource utilization across multiple clusters, clouds and partners.
Decisio Health is an organization of dedicated doctors, nurses, engineers, data scientists and business professionals with the goal of solving the third leading cause of death in the USA: preventable medical errors and deaths. Decisio provides the first web native, FDA cleared medical device, providing actionable information at the point of patient care.
A DevOps team of four, Decisio Health maintains a multi-cluster environment, including four QA clusters, 18 demo clusters and multiple environments across Azure and AWS with partners. Ensuring cluster security became a requirement for Glen Zangirolami, Principal DevOps Architect at Decisio Health. “We needed to be certain that our Docker images and Helm charts were up to date and secure. We came across Fairwinds in our search for Kubernetes software.”
Fairwinds Insights is Kubernetes security and governance software that helps organizations manage multi-cluster environments. By continuously scanning all clusters for Kubernetes best practices across security, cost optimization and compliance, Fairwinds Insights simplifies complexity and reduces risk. Insights prevents Kubernetes misconfigurations from getting into production environments by shifting its security and governance software “left,” to the development environment.
“Using Fairwinds, we are now updating our Docker images and operating system, Debian, as needed, ensuring we are up to date and secure with the latest patches. Fairwinds also helped kick start some new activity at Decisio. We’ve implemented Dependabot for automating dependency updating in Python. Fairwinds helps to detect security vulnerabilities on top of this, helping us to keep up-to-date, end-to-end.”
Decisio continues to grow its DevOps teams, including new security experts. “Fairwinds Insights is crucial to our security team, helping us to keep our day-to-day secure and moving. We have been able to improve our cluster health by preventing misconfigurations from entering clusters.”
Fairwinds Insights is not just a Kubernetes security solution. The platform provides Kubernetes cost optimization by monitoring expenditures to identify opportunities where cost can be reduced without impacting performance.
Zangirolami continued, “The cloud will hammer you to death with bills. A major benefit of Fairwinds Insights is its resource utilization and cost optimization. We are able to use Fairwinds’ resource recommendations to provide details on our utilization and price our solution appropriately.”
“Understanding our cluster size is an important part of pricing our solutions correctly. Using Fairwinds Insights, we were able to rightsize the number of nodes and databases per cluster. That understanding helped us reduce our cost per cluster by 25%. With 25+ clusters in production and growing, that cost saving is significant.”
Decisio is also monitoring its service usage and implementing CPU and memory limitations based on Fairwinds’ recommendations to avoid over allocating or starving resources. “It allows our team to tune application limits and requests as we continue to onboard new hospitals."
Because containers are ephemeral, it can be difficult to identify if companies are compliant in the first place or when a container no longer complies. Fairwinds Insights Compliance Self-Assessment solution maps to many compliance regulations, making the compliance scope around Kubernetes and containers easy to understand and implement. As a healthcare solution, Decisio Health partners require compliance with HITRUST. Fairwinds Insights Compliance Self-Assessment feature will become supporting evidence Decisio needs to demonstrate compliance.
“Fairwinds helps Decisio stay secure, optimize costs and resource utilization and will play a compliance role as we deliver services to our partners.”
Glen Zangirolami, Principal DevOps Architect at Decisio Health
