Managed Kubernetes is a service offered by cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure (Azure), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that simplifies the deployment, management, and scaling of Kubernetes clusters. These cloud providers each offer their own “flavor” of managed K8s: Microsoft’s Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). All of these services provide powerful capabilities that make it easier to deploy Kubernetes. Fairwinds Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service is a people-led offering that manages the entire underlying Kubernetes platform and all the third-party tooling organizations need to make the most of K8s’ powerful capabilities.

Understanding Managed Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source system that enables you to automate deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation provides great support for the Kubernetes community and K8s itself offers a lot of documentation. Still, setting up your own Kubernetes cluster involves a lot of expertise in terms of managing the underlying infrastructure, configuring the cluster, and maintaining its ongoing operations. Getting started can be complicated and time-consuming, especially if your organization doesn’t have in-house Kubernetes expertise.

Managed Kubernetes takes care of some of this complexity. Cloud service providers (CSPs) offer managed Kubernetes to simplify the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications. AKS, EKS, and GKE all handle the Kubernetes control plane, and underlying physical infrastructure. They also offer tools within their ecosystems to make it easier to deploy and manage containerized applications, though AKS, EKS, and GKE each have different strengths and weaknesses.

These providers also make it easy to automatically scale resources based on application demands and ensure application uptime through redundancy and failover mechanisms. Managed Kubernetes also offers some built in security features to protect your applications and services (but you’ll still bear responsibility for some aspects of security under a shared responsibility model). Each managed Kubernetes provider also enables seamless integration with other cloud services within their respective ecosystems (AWS, Azure, and GCP), such as storage, databases, and networking.

Understanding Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service

While AKS, EKS, and GKE manage some aspects of Kubernetes, it can still be difficult for engineering teams to manage Kubernetes in-house and still spend time building and developing their own business differentiators. Fairwinds’ white-glove Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service builds your K8s infrastructure to your unique requirements, enabling your in-house team to make the most of the performance, reliability, scalability, and availability of Kubernetes, regardless of which cloud provider you choose.

Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service is people-led, so our Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) are there to make it simple for you to deploy your workloads. Here’s an overview of how we simplify our clients’ Kubernetes journey with our people-led services. Fairwinds SREs:

• Design and build a production-grade Kubernetes cluster that addresses your specific business needs
• Deploy best-in-class tooling and add-ons  with GitOps to increase the flexibility, security, and reliability of Kubernetes for your organization
• Ensure that the tools and processes you already use in-house work well with Kubernetes so you can deploy easily
• Manage  Kubernetes upgrades so you’re running on the latest stable version that’s suitable for your business needs
• Implement robust security measures, including role-based access control (RBAC), network policies, and continuous monitoring for and patching of CVEs to protect against emerging threats
• Monitor cluster performance and suggest optimizations based on your usage patterns over time
• Provide long-term support and management, optimizing your Kubernetes environments for security, efficiency, and reliability
• Make it easy to expand your Kubernetes footprint
• Offer a full-service 24/7 pager for your infrastructure

Provisioning, scaling, and upgrading clusters can be difficult, but managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service means you are always using the appropriate version of Kubernetes and related add-ons. Fairwinds makes it easy for organizations to focus engineering team efforts on business differentiation, not dealing with the complexities of Kubernetes infrastructure.

“All the troubleshooting, expert review and advice that happens with Fairwinds is awesome. The team is responsive – managing our clusters, upgrades, CVEs, 24/7 pager – it’s a no-brainer for us to partner with Fairwinds to manage Kubernetes.”
Joel Dalley, Director of Engineering, Redeam

Get the Expertise You Need

AKS, EKS, and GKE all offer comprehensive documentation that can help engineering teams to get set up and troubleshoot issues. They make built-in resources and troubleshooting tools available within their respective user interfaces. These managed Kubernetes providers also offer support plans and community forums to enable peer-to-peer support and knowledge sharing. In general, support from these providers covers management of core Kubernetes components, support for issues related to node health and connectivity, help with network configuration and troubleshooting within their environment, as well as help for some security-related issues.

Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service offers your organization access to teams with cumulative decades of expertise in Kubernetes for less than the cost of a full time employee, which is hard to come by for a solution that’s only ten years old. As a company founded shortly after the release of Kubernetes, the Fairwinds team has years of tried and tested infrastructure expertise. To meet the needs of our clients, we have learned new technologies, leveraged best in class tooling, and written open source software for the cloud-native community. Our time in the market positions us uniquely to deliver vendor-agnostic Kubernetes management at enterprise scale. Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service is ideal for any organization seeking a partner to provide hands-on management of the Kubernetes platform, including tooling, automation, and lifecycle management. This enables you to strategically position your organization for future growth and innovation, not infrastructure management.

*** 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/aks-eks-gke-managed-kubernetes-as-a-service