Overview
HaulHub Technologies, a software engineering company focused on public transportation agencies, was ready to undertake a major infrastructure modernization project. Facing challenges with Kubernetes Operations (kOps), the company wanted to move to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to improve stability during upgrades and make maintenance simpler. As HaulHub grew, they also needed to improve cost-efficiency and ensure security in their Kubernetes infrastructure and applications.
Choosing EKS and Karpenter
When first adopting Kubernetes, HaulHub chose kOps as the best solution available at the time to deploy, upgrade, and manage Kubernetes clusters. However, recent significant Container Network Interface (CNI) changes in kOps required the company to evaluate which Kubernetes provisioning and orchestration platform best fit their current needs. As a global organization with developers working 24 hours a day, HaulHub depends on having secure, resilient, scalable, and cost-efficient infrastructure for its staging and production environments. Working with the Fairwinds team, they chose to use EKS and Karpenter to meet their demanding security, resilience, and operational efficiency requirements.
Solution
Fairwinds provided a comprehensive plan to address HaulHub’s challenges:
- Migration to Amazon EKS: Fairwinds SREs led the transition from kOps to Amazon EKS, leveraging their expertise in Kubernetes management.
- Ongoing Cluster and Upgrade Management: Fairwinds set up clusters, an infrastructure repo, Slack support, and add-on configurations, and continues to manage ongoing upgrades.
- Karpenter Migration: To improve cost efficiency, Fairwinds migrated HaulHub to Karpenter, an open source Kubernetes-native node lifecycle manager.
- Security and Compliance: Using Fairwinds Insights, Fairwinds and HaulHub ensured a robust security and compliance posture, implementing continuous Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) monitoring and remediation. Insights automatically identifies vulnerabilities, helping simplify and accelerate remediation.
“We meet weekly with a single point of contact to discuss new features, issues, and resolutions. Fairwinds often brings in additional team members with deep knowledge of a particular issue.”
Bryan Garcia, Senior SRE at HaulHub Technologies
EKS Migration
HaulHub has relied on Fairwinds Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service to run its workloads for the past three years and continues to work closely with Fairwinds to ensure its infrastructure remains reliable and secure. Because their development model includes creating new namespace environments for every feature branch, moving to EKS required fully validating the new cluster architecture, networking, and CI/CD pipelines before the cutover. Fairwinds ensured that the staging EKS cluster was an exact replica of the planned production environment, verifying that all applications, automation workflows, and operational configurations functioned correctly on EKS. This approach mitigated risk and guaranteed a smooth, safe transition without impacting the live service.
Operations & Monitoring
To ensure HaulHub's EKS infrastructure remains stable, secure, and cost-effective, continuous operational monitoring is essential. Fairwinds established 24/7 monitoring and incident response to proactively handle issues and maintain high availability in the production environment. Regular Kubernetes upgrades and monthly add-on upgrades keep the cluster and its components secure and up to date with the latest features.
“We’ve relied on Fairwinds for years to manage our AWS-hosted Kubernetes clusters, and their team’s expertise, proactive support, and commitment to best practices have made them our go-to partner for managed services and support.”
Bryan Garcia, Senior SRE at HaulHub Technologies
Karpenter Implementation
This year, Fairwinds also implemented Karpenter, the open source high-performance node provisioning project. HaulHub previously experienced a three-minute delay before new pods became available using the standard Cluster Autoscaler. By switching to Karpenter, the team dramatically improved cluster elasticity, achieving the rapid creation of new nodes with pods running in less than a minute, significantly boosting application responsiveness and scaling efficiency.
Security & Compliance
To help HaulHub maintain strict SOC 2 compliance and a strong security posture, the teams leverage Fairwinds Insights. The platform serves as the single source of truth for vulnerability management, enabling continuous CVE monitoring and remediation. Fairwinds Insights automatically checks that all configurations adhere to security best practices, logs compliance checks, and streamlines the audit process. Insights also establishes clear ownership by using App Groups to differentiate between issues that are Fairwinds' responsibility versus HaulHub's.
In addition to vulnerability management, the Fairwinds team also implemented advanced certificate management to enhance security. Fairwinds continues to manage certificates, including continuous monitoring, self-service architectures, and deployment of custom chain issuers.
Conclusion
By partnering with Fairwinds, HaulHub successfully navigated a critical modernization of its Kubernetes infrastructure, moving from the limitations of kOps to the stability and power of EKS. This transition enabled system-wide improvements in cost effectiveness, platform reliability, and security compliance, freeing engineers to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure management. The implementation of Karpenter and proactive monitoring also continue to deliver measurable gains in efficiency and scalability, while simplified SOC 2 compliance and advanced vulnerability management strengthen security posture and trust with customers and stakeholders.
HaulHub’s experience highlights the value of a collaborative, expert-driven approach to infrastructure management. With Fairwinds, HaulHub not only overcame technical and operational roadblocks, but positioned itself for future growth, ready to adapt to new business demands and technology opportunities with confidence.
What HaulHub Is Saying
“Fairwinds consistently keeps our Kubernetes environment secure, resilient, and up to date, responding quickly to issues and always seeking improvements that boost both performance and cost efficiency. Their Insights platform provides full transparency, making management straightforward and smart. We highly recommend Fairwinds for managed services and support.”
— Bryan Garcia, Senior Site Reliability Engineer at HaulHub Technologies
