The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Service Delivery designation is a specialized program designed to validate AWS Partners that have experience, deep technical expertise, and proven success delivering specific AWS services for clients. In October 2022, AWS announced a new designation for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) that focuses on the proven ability to architect, run, and operate containerized workloads on Amazon EKS.

Fairwinds has now achieved this AWS EKS Delivery Designation based on a rigorous review of our delivery model, specialized skills, and demonstrated customer successes. This designation is further evidence of our commitment to architecting, building, and managing production-grade Kubernetes environments for our clients. Becoming an Amazon EKS delivery partner makes it easier for AWS customers to find partners such as Fairwinds that possess the deep experience required to deliver specific AWS services, particularly EKS.

Fairwinds was founded in 2015 as ReactiveOps, shortly after Kubernetes was introduced. Since the very beginning, we’ve been at the forefront of the cloud native and Kubernetes movement, driving technological innovation, and developing open source solutions directly in response to challenges we needed to solve for our clients using Kubernetes. Our open source tooling contributes to the broader cloud native ecosystem and helps with a wide range of challenges commonly encountered by people managing Kubernetes. We built (and maintain): 

• Polaris, a policy engine to validate and remediate K8s resources
• Goldilocks, a utility that makes easier to identify a starting point for setting resource requests and limits
• Pluto, a utility that makes it easy to find deprecated Kubernetes API versions in Infrastructure as Code  (IaC) repositories and Helm releases
• And many more open source solutions

We developed many of these tools specifically to more efficiently meet our clients needs when deploying Kuberentes to production environments.

While Amazon EKS manages the availability and scalability of the Kubernetes control plane responsible for scheduling containers, managing application availability, storing cluster data, and other essential tasks, it can still be challenging to manage Kubernetes in-house. Our Amazon EKS service offerings make it easy for organizations to get started with EKS. Fairwinds’ white-glove Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service enables us to build your K8s infrastructure to your unique requirements, so you can make the most of the performance, reliability, scalability, and availability of EKS on AWS infrastructure.

Whether you’re already running your service or application in Kubernetes or you’re just getting started, our Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) can make it simple for you to deploy your workloads. Our services include standing up a production-grade EKS cluster, equipping it with the tooling and add-ons you need, and ensuring that moving workloads to production is a seamless process.

Fairwinds also provides long-term management for your Kubernetes infrastructure. We set up monitoring and alerting, provide ongoing maintenance, and expert guidance to ensure that EKS continues to meet the needs of your organization.

Here’s a simple overview of how we simplify our clients’ EKS journey with our people-led services:

1: Architect and Build Kubernetes Clusters

Fairwinds designs and builds a production-grade Kubernetes cluster specifically to highlight the power of EKS in terms of addressing your specific business needs.

2: Add-Ons & Tooling

We deploy best-in-class tooling and add-ons with GitOps to increase the flexibility, security, and reliability of Kubernetes for you.

3: Workload Onboarding

Nearly every engineering organization already has tools and processes in place for deploying code. Fairwinds makes moving workloads seamless by ensuring that these tools and processes work well with Kubernetes so you can be sure that your infrastructure is optimized for cost, performance, and security.

4: Expansion

If you’re new to EKS, Fairwinds makes it easy to expand your EKS footprint by offering a full-service 24/7 pager for your infrastructure, including Kubernetes upgrades and handling CVEs handling so you can rest easy knowing that Kubernetes vulnerabilities and misconfigurations are being addressed quickly.

5. Long-term Management

Fairwinds provides long-term support and management for clients, optimizing each Kubernetes environment for security, efficiency, and reliability. Fairwinds provides full lifecycle management of Kubernetes clusters, including provisioning, scaling, upgrading, and decommissioning to ensure that EKS clusters are always running on the appropriate version of Kubernetes and add-ons. Fairwinds also monitors cluster performance and suggests optimizations based on usage patterns. In addition, Fairwinds implements robust security measures, including role-based access control (RBAC), network policies, and continuous monitoring for and patching of CVEs to protect against emerging threats.

Building on EKS

Fairwinds builds on the native capabilities of EKS to create additional layers of optimization, security, monitoring, and support. EKS is tightly integrated into the Amazon ecosystem as well as other industry standard tools and is available in over 200 regions across 400 availability zones. Fairwinds takes advantage of native EKS capabilities and customizes it to more tightly configure security settings and test changes thoroughly in non-production environments before allowing them to be released more widely.

By partnering with Fairwinds Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service, you can get started right and avoid unnecessary rebuilds, select the right regions, and ensure that services can communicate with or discover one another as needed without putting your environment at risk. This enables your engineering team to focus on your business differentiators and sleep through the night. With Fairwinds, you’ll have a Kubernetes platform that is not only production-ready but also aligned with your business goals and operational strategies.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Fairwinds | Blog authored by Andy Suderman. Read the original post at: https://www.fairwinds.com/blog/fairwinds-delivers-aws-eks-delivery-designation