A Kubernetes Infrastructure Design Assessment is an important step for organizations seeking to ensure reliable, cost effective, and secure infrastructure. At Fairwinds, a K8s infrastructure design assessment is led by top-level engineers to evaluate your architecture and business needs. Most organizations begin their Kubernetes journey with pilot programs and then expand from there, without pausing to evaluate existing infrastructure and whether expansion has been done as effectively as possible. A K8s infrastructure design assessment will identify gaps and provide actionable recommendations based on specialized knowledge of Kubernetes infrastructure and the broader cloud-native ecosystem.
Kubernetes is now the de facto standard for container orchestration. It’s now been over 10 years since the project was originally released, and the cloud-native community has continued to grow and mature. That means there are a lot of choices to make and a lot of complexity to understand in your K8s environment. To help you make sure your infrastructure aligns with best practices, our site reliability engineers (SREs) will look at several key areas to make sure you’re in good shape (or help you get there).
The K8s infrastructure design assessment ensures that you are in alignment with relevant industry standards, such as System and Organization Controls 2 (SOC 2), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Privacy Rule, and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We’ll evaluate whether you have (and are enforcing) policies related to role-based access control (RBAC), network segmentation, Denial of Service (DoS) protection, automated vulnerability scanning (plus patching and updating), Secrets management, and workload identity.
During an assessment, Fairwinds SREs analyze your existing cluster autoscaling strategies (horizontal/vertical) and resource allocation using open source tools, such as Goldilocks, to optimize CPU and memory requests and limits. While Goldilocks is great for getting started, the assessment also includes performance tuning for multi-cluster environments.The assessment also includes architectural designs that will grow with the needs of your organization, so you’re prepared for spikes or changes in load as business needs evolve.
Many organizations understand the appeal of GitOps, but aren’t sure how to get started with it or how to implement it effectively. That’s why the K8s infrastructure design assessment includes streamlined workflows for small and large development teams. It helps you get started with tried-and-true workflows that help you increase automation by creating a declarative single source of truth that is continuously reconciled with changes, minimizing the risk of misconfigurations. As part of the assessment, we make sure you have version-controlled infrastructure, which makes collaboration easier across internal and external teams.
The K8s infrastructure design assessment is designed for flexibility. So whether your organization is large or small or your existing infrastructure is on-prem or already in Kubernetes, SREs deliver a comprehensive transformation strategy to follow. A key aspect of the assessment is to work collaboratively with your team to create a long-term vision that’s aligned with your business objectives and how to achieve them using Kubernetes infrastructure.
The total engagement time is highly dependent on the size and maturity of your current infrastructure setup. Some key considerations include:
Throughout this Kubernetes infrastructure design assessment, the Fairwinds team of SREs builds in dedicated opportunities to review and refine your plans and diagrams. This iterative approach ensures that the evolving design aligns with your organization's unique requirements and strategic objectives at every stage.
The Fairwinds SRE team will collaborate closely with your key stakeholders throughout this process to develop a future-state plan that's precisely tailored to your needs. This involves in-depth discussions to identify existing pain points within your current Kubernetes setup and determine the solutions needed to achieve your specific organizational goals.
A K8s Infrastructure Design Assessment engagement typically includes:
Fairwinds combines deep Kubernetes expertise with Fairwinds Insights and other open source tooling to automate policy enforcement, monitoring, and cost management. The K8s infrastructure design assessment provides a clear roadmap designed by skilled engineers for achieving production-grade reliability while minimizing operational overhead.
Ready to optimize your Kubernetes infrastructure? Let’s discuss how a K8s design assessment can align your infrastructure with business goals.