In this digital-first world, organizations are constantly under pressure to deliver software and services faster, more reliably, and at greater scale. Platform teams, often small but tasked with supporting dozens or even hundreds of engineers, are at the heart of this transformation. For these teams, managed services can become a strategic lever, delivering not just operational support, but also a rapid, near immediate, path to value. With the right managed services partner, your organization can accelerate time-to-value, empower lean platform teams, and drive measurable business outcomes.
Time to Value (TTV) is a critical metric in today’s technology landscape. It measures how quickly an organization realizes tangible benefits after adopting a new solution. All too often, a sales team overpromises on the ability for a single software solution to deliver value within days of purchase, discounting the time it takes to install, deploy, and learn a new solution.
Even the simplest software solution still needs to be configured for your environment and you have to learn how to use it effectively — that’s why there are customer success teams in place, to help you get the value of your product. And it’s not just a learning curve — there’s also culture to contend with, where you basically need to win the hearts and minds of your developers and platform team members.
With managed services, TTV is often dramatically shorter than software adoption. Once you find the right vendor, you can get to work quickly. For example, Fairwinds Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service (KaaS) brings experienced site reliability engineers (SREs) to the table, people who together have decades of experience architecting, building, and managing production grade infrastructure.
There’s no software solution that really compares. You’d need to build an in-house team, starting with selecting which managed Kubernetes provider to use: Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), or Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Your choice depends on your existing architecture and to some extent, your use cases. You’ll also need time (weeks to months) for recruitment, onboarding, and infrastructure setup. And of course you’ll need to maintain your infrastructure, including K8s upgrades, add-on updates, and more.
Managed KaaS teams, on the other hand, can deliver production-ready environments and operational excellence much more quickly, and the service includes management of third-party tooling, including add-ons and APIs, security hardening, and more.
This rapid delivery and implementation is possible because managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service from Fairwinds brings:
As a result, organizations that work with experienced managed KaaS providers can begin taking advantage of the benefits—improved reliability, enhanced security, and greater efficiency—almost immediately, regardless of which cloud provider you use.
"We actually don't think about our stack anymore. We do what we need to do. We write code. It gets deployed. Everything works."
- Stan, Development Team Member at Fathom
A common challenge in scaling engineering organizations is the mismatch between a small platform or SRE team and a much larger engineering group. Managed services fundamentally change this dynamic by providing:
This means platform teams can focus on strategic initiatives and innovation, rather than being a bottleneck for developer productivity.
Leveraging Fairwinds Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service consistently demonstrates the operational benefits:
“With Fairwinds Insights, we have more confidence that our platform is reliable and secure.”
- Veena Kannepalli, Senior DevOps Engineer at Veracode
One unique value offered by Fairwinds managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service is the inclusion of Fairwinds Insights, which enables the automatic enforcement of Kubernetes best practices for reliability, cost efficiency, and security without slowing down development. With automated guardrails, your organization can ensure that Kubernetes and other infrastructure best practices are applied organization-wide, without requiring manual intervention or creating process bottlenecks.
This approach empowers developers to self-service and innovate, while platform teams retain the necessary visibility and control to maintain operational standards and compliance. The result is a more agile, responsive engineering organization that can adapt quickly to changing business needs.
“Fairwinds Insights saves the platform team one to two weeks of work -- and developers even more time. We've gone from a manual process over weeks, to a fully automated process, saving significant time and resources.”
- Viban Daniel - Manager, Platform Engineering at Variant
Managed services are inherently scalable and flexible. As business needs change, whether due to growth, new product launches, or shifting market demands, Fairwinds Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service can quickly adjust resources and support levels to match. This elasticity is particularly valuable for organizations operating in dynamic environments or undergoing rapid expansion.
Managed KaaS deliver immediate value, providing access to deep expertise and enabling rapid, reliable scaling. This empowers platform teams to focus on business growth instead of infrastructure management. The result is faster time-to-value, greater efficiency, and a stronger foundation for innovation.
Read Fathom’s case study to learn how Fairwinds transformed their infrastructure management.
