Overview
Framebridge, a fast-growing custom framing company, sought to modernize its technology infrastructure by moving from Kubernetes Operations (kOps) to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to support its business goals. As the company scaled, it faced challenges with its existing Kubernetes deployment using kOps, prompting the team to rebuild its clusters on EKS.
Ready to Move Off kOps
An early Kubernetes adopter, Framebridge evaluated EKS when it was first released, but at the time it wasn’t mature enough to fit their needs. They chose kOps as the best solution available at the time. After years of relying on kOps, however, a significant Container Network Interface (CNI) change in kOps now required unavoidable downtime on the clusters during the upgrade to Kubernetes 1.26, so Framebridge opted to migrate over to EKS. Staying on kOps would have required significant effort in terms of maintaining and upgrading the Kubernetes clusters, limiting the team's ability to focus on innovation and growth. The lack of consistency across clients and the challenges in managing the infrastructure efficiently were becoming increasingly problematic.
Solution
Fairwinds provided a comprehensive solution to address Framebridge's challenges:
- Migration to Amazon EKS: Fairwinds SREs guided Framebridge through the transition from kOps to Amazon EKS version 1.26, leveraging their expertise in Kubernetes management.
- Infrastructure as Code: Implemented Terraform for managing EKS, ensuring consistency and simplifying infrastructure management.
- Streamlined Upgrades: Established a process for smoother, documented upgrades within specified work hours (9-5 ET).
The EKS Migration
Framebridge already relies on Fairwinds Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service to run its workloads, working closely together to ensure that the company’s infrastructure is reliable and secure. When Framebridge was ready to move from kOps to EKS, Fairwinds SREs conducted a comprehensive analysis of the existing infrastructure and workflows to ensure a seamless migration and minimal downtime during the process. Fairwinds set up a maintenance window to ensure a clean zero-downtime cutover, taking steps to mitigate any potential issues. The team created a rollback plan in case the transition did not go as smoothly as planned. Fairwinds SREs also built out clusters in parallel to ensure consistency across environments
Planning
The engagement kicked off with a comprehensive analysis of the current infrastructure and workflows to understand their specific challenges and objectives. Following this collaborative planning phase, Fairwinds deployed its Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service, focusing on:
- Ensuring a smooth transition to EKS 1.26, avoiding the potential pitfalls of undocumented changes sometimes encountered with kOps upgrades.
- Minimizing downtime. Unlike kOps, which required scaling down and up during upgrades, EKS ensured future updates with minimal to no downtime.
- Availability and scalability. The new EKS environment efficiently handled traffic spikes and supported Framebridge's growth initiatives.
- Seamless integrations. Native to Amazon's ecosystem, the EKS migration provided seamless integrations with other AWS services, including AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS networking services, and Fargate configurations.
- Simpler infrastructure management. A Terraform implementation ensured consistent infrastructure management.
Implementation
Framebridge experienced significant improvements following the migration from kOps to Amazon EKS:
- White-Glove Kubernetes Management: Fairwinds implemented a fully managed EKS solution, providing end-to-end management of the company’s Kubernetes infrastructure. This service included cluster setup, configuration, monitoring, and ongoing optimization.
- Specialized Expertise and Advisory: Fairwinds operates as an extension of the internal tech team, providing deep Kubernetes expertise. Regular advisory sessions and best practices sharing empowered the in-house teams to leverage Kubernetes more effectively.
- Operational Efficiency: By taking over the heavy lifting of Kubernetes management, Fairwinds significantly reduced the operational burden on the company. This shift allowed the company’s engineers to focus on building and enhancing services rather than K8s infrastructure management.
- Seamless Integration with Development Workflows: Fairwinds ensured that the Kubernetes solution was fully compatible with the company’s existing development workflows and tools, especially GitLab. This integration streamlined CI/CD pipelines, enhancing deployment velocity and reliability.
Conclusion
The partnership between Framebridge and Fairwinds highlights how expert guidance from a Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service provider streamlines complex Kubernetes transitions. To simplify Kubernetes management and upgrades, Fairwinds has built multiple open source tools for itself and the cloud-native community as a whole, including Rok8s-Scripts, which the team leveraged during the migration process to easily deploy applications to the new cluster. By leveraging Fairwinds' expertise and Amazon EKS, Framebridge successfully updated its infrastructure to EKS, enabling the company to focus on its core business of delivering exceptional custom framing services to its customers.
What Framebridge Is Saying
"Fairwinds' Kubernetes expertise allowed us to accelerate our infrastructure modernization while ensuring our systems are secure, efficient, and scalable. The transition to EKS has significantly improved our upgrade processes and overall system reliability. With Fairwinds, we don’t need to worry about what version of Kubernetes we are running on or what add-ons we need to update, they just handle all of that for us so we can focus on improving our product."
Brock Wilcox, VP Engineering at Framebridge
Overview
Fathom, a digital manufacturing company that provides advanced rapid prototyping and on-demand low volume production services, faced significant challenges with their outdated infrastructure. Their legacy setup, based on basic AWS configurations and Jenkins deployments, required considerable involvement from their infrastructure vendor. Deployments took hours to complete, and often failed, requiring considerable support from internal and external resources.
The team felt like they had something on fire almost every month, putting them in a constant state of stress. Stan, a member of the development team at Fathom, who was familiar with the Fairwinds Ops team from a previous role, recognized the need for modern, scalable infrastructure and turned to Fairwinds for help building and maintaining production-grade Kubernetes infrastructure.
Ready to Transform Infrastructure Management
Fathom, well known as a high-precision, responsive, and comprehensive manufacturing partner, offers a wide range of services, from CNC machining to rapid tooling and injection molding to engineering and design support. Serving diverse industries, including aerospace, automotive, government, industrial, and medical, the company offers expertise that enables faster product-to-market timelines and a commitment to quality and security. To do all this well, they needed infrastructure that was modern, scalable, and efficient. Instead of wasting valuable time troubleshooting their existing solutions, they wanted to move to Kubernetes in a way that enabled them to focus on their operational goals.
The Challenges
- Outdated cloud architecture: Fathom was using basic AWS configurations that did not include auto-scaling groups or enable easy deployments.
- Time-consuming and unreliable deployments: Deployments often took hours and frequently failed, requiring rollbacks.
- Lack of self-sufficiency: The company relied heavily on a traditional release engineer, hindering their ability to deploy quickly and efficiently.
- Frequent issues and firefighting: The team spent a large amount of time just getting things to work, dealing with problems that weren't related to development.
- Inefficient resource allocation: The infrastructure wasn't optimized, leading to wasted time and effort on managing hosting infrastructure instead of focusing on business differentiators.
- Limited scalability: The existing setup couldn't handle increased demand efficiently, impacting their ability to grow and adapt to changing demands.
These challenges were significantly impacting Fathom's productivity, causing stress, and preventing the team from focusing on their core development work.
Solution: Transformed Infrastructure Management
By implementing Fairwinds' Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service and Fairwinds Insights, Fathom experienced a dramatic improvement in their deployment processes and infrastructure management. With access to Fairwinds expert site reliability engineers (SREs) and the Insights dashboards, Fathom was able to more easily:
- Right-size clusters: Using the right-sizing guidance in Insights, Fathom was able to optimize resource utilization and scale up and down based on demand without incurring unnecessary cloud spend.
- Gain visibility: Fairwinds Insights provided a single pane of glass, delivering a comprehensive view of the environment that highlighted vulnerabilities, simplified monitoring and cost optimization, enabled automatic alignment with Kubernetes best practices, and provided in-application guidance to fix issues.
- Improve security: Working closely with Fairwinds SREs, the team focused on scanning containers for vulnerabilities (and addressing them) and ensuring secure Kubernetes deployment configurations.
- Streamline deployments: By leveraging Kubernetes and Helm, Fathom was able to do quick rollbacks when (or if) necessary and build more flexible development processes.
Measurable Results and Productivity Gains
The impact of Fairwinds' solutions on Fathom's operations has been significant over the seven years that the two companies have been working together. The operations team there estimates that by leveraging Fairwinds Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service and Fairwinds Insights, they have:
- Saved approximately three days of cycle time per month on deployment issues and configuration problems.
- Increased project delivery by one additional project per quarter.
- Reduced significant incidents from monthly occurrences to quarterly at most.
- Eliminated the need for frequent discussions about hosting infrastructure issues with the management team.
"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
Unexpected Benefits and Continuous Optimization
Fathom also found additional value in Fairwinds' proactive approach to optimization. Wilson Yan, Senior Software Engineer at Fathom, noted, "Fairwinds helps support you with data-driven actions that you would never have thought about." The team shared that they particularly appreciate Fairwinds' enthusiasm for optimizing stacks and development processes, ensuring the best performance for their services.
A Partnership That Delivers
Fathom's experience with Fairwinds has been overwhelmingly positive. The partnership has not only met but in many ways exceeded expectations in terms of return on investment.
This partnership highlights the benefits of combining Fairwinds Insights for Kubernetes governance and security and managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service for end-to-end cluster management on production-grade infrastructure. By using these two complementary solutions, companies like Fathom can focus on their core business while trusting that their infrastructure is secure, reliable, and efficient.
What Fathom Is Saying
"You want to work with Fairwinds because you get a single pane of glass for your clusters and full turnkey service for your DevOps without having to expend unnecessary effort or think too hard about it."
Wilson Yan, Senior Software Engineer at Fathom
