Fairwinds Insights Now Generally Available: Software Helps Enterprises Run Kubernetes Securely and Efficiently at Scale

Platform Proactively Monitors and Validates Kubernetes and Container Configurations

Boston, MA – (April 28, 2020) – Fairwinds, the Kubernetes enablement company, today introduced the general availability (GA) of Fairwinds Insights, a configuration validation platform that enables engineering and DevOps teams to run applications on Kubernetes securely, efficiently, and reliably. Now GA, the platform has been tried and tested during the five month public beta helping dozens of organizations prioritize and remediate configuration security, efficiency and reliability risks.

Fairwinds Insights combines trusted open source tools, toolchain integrations, and Fairwinds’ Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) expertise based on hundreds of successful Kubernetes deployments. While traditional infrastructure monitoring tools only react to system problems, Fairwinds Insights provides continuous visibility, prioritized recommendations, and collaboration tools. It enables teams to apply Kubernetes configuration best practices while moving applications from development to production.

In addition to revealing configuration problems, Fairwinds Insights also offers clear remediation steps and code examples so engineering teams can improve upon what they’ve built.

Fairwinds Insights enables DevOps teams to improve:

• Security - Provides continuous visibility into an organization’s Kubernetes security posture by scanning containers for vulnerabilities, validating deployment configurations, and auditing clusters for weaknesses. Prioritizes the riskiest configurations for faster fixes to reduce security debt and maintain compliance.
• Efficiency - Offers recommendations into application resource usage, so engineers can avoid trial-and-error when adjusting CPU and memory settings -- ultimately increasing the efficiency of Kubernetes compute resources and saving money in the cloud, or capacity in the data center. Saves time working across development, security, and operations teams with built-in workflows, notifications, and integrations with tools like Slack.
• Reliability - Kubernetes’ health checks, self-healing and monitoring capabilities have to be configured properly. With Fairwinds Insights, platform teams can ensure that best practices are followed throughout the organization and validate that containers are configured and managed correctly. 

Quotes

Brent Jaworski, Lead DevOps Engineer at Boxed

“We use Fairwinds Insights as an overall monitoring tool for our clusters. It consolidates all our alerts and security in one place helping to lower the resources needed to identify problems. Fairwinds Insights gives us a top down, holistic view of the overall health of our clusters. It is much easier for us to identify problems and prioritize fixes with Fairwinds Insights. It’s been a really great tool for our team.” (read Boxed case study)

Dominic O’Kane, Senior Cloud Engineer, Sidecar

"Fairwinds Insights has made it much easier for us to plan infrastructure improvements. The platform allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the health and performance of our clusters, trace down problematic configuration affecting our workloads, and strengthen our security posture. All from a clean, centralized interface."

Kendall Miller, President, Fairwinds

“Kubernetes is maturing and while the difficult issues are no longer just standing up a cluster, companies still want to be sure they’re adopting it securely and efficiently. This is especially problematic as engineering organizations expand Kubernetes to multiple teams and rely on Kubernetes infrastructure for mission-critical applications. It’s not uncommon for DevOps teams to be under-staffed and lack the bandwidth to manually inspect every change introduced by a variety of engineering teams. That’s why we’ve built Fairwinds Insights to proactively monitor Kubernetes and container configurations and suggest improvements, helping DevOps teams avoid problems before they arise.”

More information about Fairwinds Insights, including how to sign up for a free trial, is available here.