Transforming Kubernetes deployments for an American fast food company with Fairwinds' Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service
Overview
A forward-thinking food company continuously improving its technology wanted to focus its team on building a self service platform and outsource some of the platform work related to deploying clusters and keeping systems operational. This much-loved fast food chain operates thousands of stand-alone restaurants, primarily in North America, running its technology on Kubernetes. As the organization sought to move away from legacy applications and improve automation, it discovered a critical need for streamlined Kubernetes management and expertise.
Ready for Kubernetes Expansion
This food company is renowned for its customer service and food quality, serving freshly cooked food fast to its devoted clientele. The company delivers its technology offerings in standalone stores and was eager to expand its Kubernetes footprint but did not have a platform team in place. While the application teams were ready to deploy to Kubernetes clusters, the lack of a structured platform and Kubernetes expertise hindered their progress. This gap necessitated a solution that enabled them to spin up new clusters quickly and allow more of the organization to move to Kubernetes without stalling their immediate operational goals.
The Challenges
- Need for an Internal Platform: In order to enable their application team to self-service, the internal platform wanted to build an internal development platform (IDP) that enabled developers to click a button to get a namespace in all the clusters but lacked the time and knowledge to do so.
- Policy Enforcement: While enabling developers to self-service was important, the company also needed to ensure that any applications deployed followed company policies for security, cost optimization, and resource utilization.
- Resource Distraction: Staying up to date on Kubernetes upgrades and all the related updates to add-ons and other tools consumed the internal technology teams’ time, preventing them from building new capabilities and testing out different technologies.
- Legacy Application Deployment: The company wanted to deploy and architect parallel environments, creating a migration path from old environments to new ones to slowly cut over to the new way of doing things, but didn’t have the time and resources to execute on those goals.
Solution
Fairwinds provided a comprehensive Kubernetes-as-a-Service solution, effectively becoming the company’s interim platform team. They focused on:
- Taking Over Infrastructure: Fairwinds acted as a managed service provider by doing all the infrastructure work, spinning up new clusters quickly to allow part of the client’s organization to start moving to Kubernetes while the internal platform team learned from Fairwinds’ site reliability engineers (SREs) and begin building an IDP.
- Enabling Policy Enforcement and Best Practices: The food company chose Kyverno as their preferred policy enforcement solution. Working closely with the company, Fairwinds SREs ensured that the strictest possible policies were enabled in Kyverno without impeding normal business operations.
- Third-Party Tool Integration: The client wanted to integrate Gloo Gateway, the Gloo Edge API, as their Kubernetes-native ingress controller. Although previously unfamiliar with Gloo, Fairwinds learned all about the solution and started providing the client with management support on that service. Fairwinds quickly took over upgrades and patches, deploying a parallel Gloo environment to allow the client to slowly cut over to the new deployment methods and avoid potential downtime.
- Enhanced Security Measures: Fairwinds is committed to monitoring all incoming Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) and taking action immediately on critical vulnerabilities, communicating them to the client, and creating a plan of action to remediate the vulnerabilities at a time that works for the client.
Implementation
The engagement with the food company began with a comprehensive analysis of the current infrastructure and workflows to understand their specific challenges and objectives. Following this collaborative planning phase, Fairwinds deployed its Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service, focusing on:
- Customizing cluster design and configuration to meet the food company’s specific operational and scalability requirements.
- Ensuring policies are strictly enforced while educating internal teams on Kubernetes best practices.
- Enabling the company to build an easy migration path from their old environments to the new ones without requiring downtime.
- Ensuring that the application team had the time and flexibility they needed to deploy one service at a time, with new apps optimized for automation and able to be updated instantly.
- Getting up to speed quickly on Gloo Gateway and maintaining and patching the tool to enable the deployment of a parallel Gloo environment.
- Automating TLS certificate management and DNS endpoint management and helping the company make use of more Kubernetes-native tools than before,
Throughout the implementation, Fairwinds maintained a close partnership with the company, providing continuous support, education, and advisory services to ensure the initiative's success.
Results
- Kubernetes Maintenance: This food company experienced a transformation in its Kubernetes operations. Fairwinds provides a weekly status update on upcoming changes for all different environments, allowing in-house teams to plan for these types of maintenance activities.
- Dedicated Expertise: The company makes the most of its enterprise support, relying on Fairwinds for help with any questions. Fairwinds SREs are on call for any cluster issues and provide support and guidance on new initiatives.
- Reclaimed Engineering Time: Originally, this company had no Kubernetes experts on the team, but with Fairwinds as a partner, they’ve been able to gain Kubernetes knowledge. The in-house teams have also been able to focus on building an internal development platform with policies in place that enable developers to deploy quickly to Kubernetes clusters.
Conclusion
Fairwinds’ managed Kubernetes service provided not just technical solutions but strategic business value to this beloved food company, enabling them to transition from legacy applications and deployment methods to robust, scalable, and secure Kubernetes infrastructure. Through this partnership, the organization has been able to take greater advantage of all the capabilities Kubernetes offers, positioning them for future growth and innovation.
This partnership highlights the value specialized expertise provides for organizations navigating the complexities of Kubernetes and other open-source technologies to deliver operational excellence and achieve business objectives. The company continues to evolve its offerings in collaboration with Fairwinds, reflecting a mutual commitment to leveraging technology to meet and exceed customer expectations.
What This Food Company Company Is Saying
"We appreciate the partnership with Fairwinds for helping us manage our multitude of clusters and providing the guidance to achieve our internal Kubernetes maturity initiatives. Their expertise allowed us to accelerate our Kubernetes journey while ensuring our systems are secure, efficient, and compliant."
Technology Leader, Food Company
