Wyre chose the Kubernetes governance platform, Fairwinds Insights, to help continuously scan for security updates and maintain compliance with financial regulations and SOC 2.
Wyre is on a mission to empower fintech projects to execute on their vision by offering them secure access to the largest financial network in the world (the Wyre Network). To accomplish this mission, Wyre has built a simple set of tools that allows fintech projects to materialize their visions including an instant Fiat-to-Crypto Checkout gateway and flexible APIs to allow projects to build e-wallets, merchant processing services, and money transfer platforms from the ground up. Wyre is focused on compliance, licensing, regulatory, liquidity and payment processing aspects so its partners can do what they do best, creating amazing tools on the blockchain.
As a financial network, security and compliance is essential to Wyre. Ensuring Kubernetes workloads are up-to-date with the latest security patches and Helm updates requires significant resources. With five Kubernetes environments and several SREs and developers, Wyre wanted to automate security scanning to reduce exposure and ensure compliance with required financial regulations.
Having designed and led the Wyre migration to Kubernetes including implementing monitoring, logging, CI/CD, secret management and automated infrastructure-as-code tooling, Daniel O’Sullivan, Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Wyre, added Fairwinds Insights to the stack.
Fairwinds Insights is a Kubernetes governance platform that automates security by continuously monitoring all clusters for misconfigurations. It helps to pinpoint risk from CI/CD through production. Insights provides visibility across clusters and teams with a centralized platform that scans for issues and prioritizes findings and recommendations based on severity. The Insights platform offers cost optimization advice, security alerting, configuration guardrails and compliance findings.
“At Wyre, we must ensure workloads are up-to-date with new patches as they come out. By using Fairwinds Insights, we’ve added continuous scanning that provides not only updates on new patches, but also information on Helm chart updates. Fairwinds makes sure we are staying up-to-date on everything we are using for cluster services. We can now quickly stay on top of new patches as they come along, which ties into compliance.”
“Insights also helps us standardize our Kubernetes configurations across our different environments for cluster services and applications.”
Wyre also applied the Insights findings across workloads, “Fairwinds tells you all these different aspects on how to improve the security of your workloads. We took that information back and applied it to all our workloads.”
As security plays a major part of compliance, Wyre is able to demonstrate compliance with Fairwinds Insights. “Fairwinds has been helpful for meeting our compliance goals. During a recent SOC 2 audit, I was able to show auditors how we are constantly scanning our workloads and then remediating any issues.”
Often a manual process to audit Kubernetes workloads for misconfigurations, Wyre now saves time by automating the entire process. “Insights helps us save time by generating a straightforward list of actions so the team can make changes quickly to improve our security posture. The team can identify misconfigurations and remediate, free from manually identifying problems.”
“Insights also saves time by helping us stay current with the changes in the Kubernetes ecosystem as we don’t have the bandwidth to monitor all Helm chart repos for updates.”
While security and compliance were the main drivers for Wyre selecting Fairwinds Insights, O’Sullivan also used the platform for application right-sizing. “When developing Helm charts for new services, CPU and memory can tend to be over-allocated without much thought. That can lead to performance issues or wasted cloud spend.”
Fairwinds Insights monitors application usage of CPU, memory and costs, and offers recommendations to increase efficiency of Kubernetes compute resources.
“Insights helps us right-size our applications to ensure reliability and cost efficiency.”
Daniel O’Sullivan, Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Wyre
