Scaling Kubernetes isn’t just about launching containers—it’s about choosing support models that truly let developers innovate instead of drowning in operational noise. Recently, I read Kathie Clark’s excellent blog, “What I Got Wrong About Cloud Managed Services (And Why It Matters).” It got me thinking about my own experience working inside the Kubernetes ecosystems and the broader cloud-native community. Over the past several years, Fairwinds has refined our Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service and professional services to ensure we provide valuable services in the Kubernetes ecosystem as it evolves and expands.
In our early days within the Kubernetes ecosystem, we experimented with two common patterns: an initial set up or small scale project, and monthly retainers for a set number of hours. Both of these patterns have their place, but can leave customers frustrated. For organizations actually trying to scale Kubernetes workloads and let developers focus on shipping code, neither model provides what many organizations really need: end‑to‑end, proactive management of the infrastructure itself.
In Kubernetes terms, professional services are often project‑based. You might bring in a partner to stand up a new cluster, get a Kubernetes infrastructure design assessment, migrate workloads, or roll out a service mesh. The project has a start, a middle, and an end, and you can easily tell whether it was successful (or not) based on on-time, on-budget delivery. Evaluating whether the professional services team did the work efficiently or effectively is a little bit harder to determine.
Different consultants may deploy the same cluster, conduct a design assessment, migrate the same workloads, or roll out the same service mesh in different ways. Some consultants will leave you with clean, GitOps‑based automation; others will leave you struggling with custom YAML and complex Helm charts. All of the options work, but they may not all serve you well in terms of long-term stability or cost efficiency.
Professional services are absolutely useful sometimes, especially when you don’t have time (or perhaps the knowledge) to take on an important project in-house. We offer professional services at Fairwinds, too. Different organizations simply have different needs at different times, and this is completely understandable.
Some managed Kubernetes services function much like a prepaid operations retainer. A managed service provider takes responsibility for monitoring your clusters and gives you a bucket of hours each month to make fixes and changes to your infrastructure.
This setup is a lot like hiring a professional manager for your apartment building on a monthly retainer. The landlord (your cloud provider) ensures the functionality of the building itself and access to utilities, but it’s the manager who deals with repairs, lockouts, and emergencies. If your tenants are happy and nothing breaks, you might wonder if you’re getting your money’s worth. But when a pipe bursts or the elevator fails, you suddenly need those hours (and more). That’s when you discover what “overtime” actually costs.
It's not that these managers (or managed service providers) want things to go wrong; nobody enjoys a midnight call about a broken boiler. But the way this retainer model is built, their bottom line is protected either way, while yours is subject to stress and surprise charges to keep everything working. The good news with this model is that you have access to the help you need when you need it, you just have to pay more when unexpected problems emerge.
At this point you might be wondering about where Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) fit into the ecosystem as managed Kubernetes providers.
These services are like the building owner or landlord instead of a manager. They do more than ensure the foundation is strong and the utilities stay on. These managed Kubernetes providers operate the Kubernetes API server and etcd, keep the control plane up and running, and offer easy integrations with their compute, networking, and storage solutions.
But everything above the control plane is still your responsibility. This includes:
In short, with EKS, AKS, and GKE, you get a stable API endpoint and a partially managed cluster baseline, but you’re still on the hook for the day‑2 operational burden of running Kubernetes. That’s exactly where we believe Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service plays a critical role.
A true managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service provider functions more like a high-end building manager with a proactive maintenance staff and a concierge: they are responsible for ensuring smooth daily operations, handling preventive upgrades, and responding quickly when things veer off-course. Instead of billing for every time someone gets locked out, they set a flat monthly fee and invest in making sure fewer emergencies happen in the first place.
How do managed KaaS providers do it? They embrace a few key principles, including:
Put simply, managed KaaS providers reduce toil for your dev and ops teams by handling most platform operations. And because efficient, well‑architected clusters require less reactive work, the model becomes more effective over time.
With managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service, most infrastructure considerations are in scope. Upgrades to Kubernetes and add-ons, responsive scaling, and node issues are all handled as part of the service, not billed as extra line items. Your incentives are aligned with your service provider’s incentives. If the provider is on the hook when kubelets malfunction at 3 a.m., the managed KaaS provider will design things so they’re not paged at 3 a.m. (their SREs don’t want to wake up, either!). Advisory is also included. If you’re about to over‑provision nodes or misconfigure a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA), they’ll warn you before you overspend because preventing an issue is both cheaper for you and more efficient for them.
One thing we’ve learned over time at Fairwinds is that success doesn’t look dramatic.
In a project model, success is easy to show: “Look, we migrated 50 services in six months!” In managed services, success is quieter: seamless rolling K8s and add-on upgrades, autoscalers keeping workloads stable, developers pushing code without even thinking about nodes or manifests.
Just as a good building manager’s greatest achievement is tenants who never complain, the best sign of a reliable, secure managed Kubernetes platform is that your team barely notices it running.
If you’re evaluating a few managed Kubernetes providers, ask yourself:
At the end of the day, your cluster is your runway for innovation. If you’re spending time managing a bucket of hours from your managed service provider, fighting YAML drift, searching through cloud overage bills to see why they’re so high, or struggling to deploy apps, you’re distracted from delivering your real outcome: faster features, happier developers (and customers), and more resilient systems.
For the team at Fairwinds, true managed Kubernetes isn't about outsourcing ops hours; it’s about partnering with a team whose profit comes from nothing breaking, not from putting out fires.
Curious whether your team is carrying too much operational burden? Schedule a strategy call with Fairwinds, or check out real stories from our Managed KaaS customers.
