Fairwinds Launches DevOps-Focused Cloud Service for Secure, Reliable Kubernetes Deployments

Fairwinds is offering a cloud-based service platform that aims to ensure a more secure and reliable deployment of Kubernetes. IDN looks at the company’s Fairwinds Insight cloud-based service. 

by Brenda Fox

Tags: Apps, cloud, deployment, DevOps, Fairwinds, Kubernetes, open source, security,

Fairwinds has launched in beta a cloud-based service platform that aims to ensure a more secure and reliable deployment of Kubernetes.

 

Fairwinds Insight is an Open Source as a Service platform, integrating best-of-breed Kubernetes auditing tools that improve cluster security, workload reliability, and engineering productivity.

 

The goal is to provide DevOps teams a set of solutions to address a variety of problems they face, especially when working with Kubernetes, according to Fairwinds vice president of strategy Joe Pelletier.

 

“Many DevOps teams have sprawling Kubernetes environments and want to get a handle on it, but with lack of resources and expertise, it’s not a priority,” Pelletier said in a statement. “Fairwinds Insights is the first platform that solves this problem by leveraging best-of-breed, community-built open source tooling and operationalizing it in a way DevOps teams can use at scale.”

 

In specific, Fairwinds Insights delivers functionality to:

  • Eliminate the time-intensive process of researching, learning, and deploying the great Kubernetes auditing tools that are available.
  • Automatically organize and normalizes data from each tool, so engineers get prioritized recommendations across all clusters.
  • Enable DevOps teams to manage the hand-off from development to production proactively. Because the platform can integrate into deployment pipelines, misconfigurations can be identified and fixed before releasing to production.

To deliver these capabilities, Fairwinds Insights enables DevOps leaders to operationalize multiple open source tools with a single deployment. In specific, it bundles several helpful tools.

Fairwinds Cluster

Among them: 

 

Fairwinds Polaris: This tool aims to help users avoid configuration issues that affect the stability, reliability, scalability, and security of your applications. Fairwinds Polaris scan of Kubernetes workloads allows teams to spot potential problems early in the application lifecycle and stay aligned with best practices. Fairwinds Polaris also presents result categorization by Kubernetes namespace, which helps both application and infrastructure teams address configuration issues in parallel, resulting in faster time production.

 

Fairwinds Goldilocks: This tool aims to take the guesswork out of setting resource requests and limits on applications running in Kubernetes production deployments, thereby helping to optimize resource utilization and ensure that applications run correctly. This tool allows teams to set precise resource requests and limits for their Kubernetes workloads.  Fairwinds Goldilocks employs the Kubernetes Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA), which contains a recommendation engine based on the current amount of resources used in your pods to provide a guideline.

 

Aqua Security's Kube-hunter: This is an open-source tool that hunts for security issues in your Kubernetes clusters. It’s designed to increase awareness and visibility of the security controls in Kubernetes environments. From outside the cluster, kube-hunter probes a domain or address range for open Kubernetes-related ports, and tests for any configuration issues that leave your cluster exposed to attackers.

 

One early adopted reported on the improvements Fairwinds Insights delivered to their team.

 

Dominic O'Kane, a senior cloud engineer at Sidecar, said in a statement, "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."




back