GKE / AUTOPILOT KICKSTART

Test-Drive GKE with Fairwinds' GKE Kickstart Program

Managing Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is complex and demands deep expertise. Fairwinds lowers the barrier to entry by delivering people-led, white-glove GKE managed services—engineered for scalability, security, automation, and repeatability.

Whether launching a new application, running a Proof of Concept (POC) or Proof of Value (POV) for GKE, or migrating existing workloads to Google Cloud Platform, our Kubernetes Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) guide you at every step. We rapidly provision production-grade GKE clusters, equipped with best-in-class tooling and add-ons using GitOps—an approach leveraging Git repositories as the single source of truth for automating Kubernetes infrastructure. This guarantees transparency, version control, and reliable recovery, thereby improving resiliency and compliance in your GCP environment.

At Fairwinds, we simplify GKE onboarding, eliminate operational bottlenecks, and accelerate your GKE adoption, increasing speed-to-production with enterprise-grade security, resiliency, and intelligent automation.

Step 1: GKE Cluster Setup

• Rapid provisioning of secure, production-ready GKE clusters—built to maximize the power of GKE for your business requirements.

• Full compliance with Google Cloud and GKE best practices for cluster architecture, VPC network design, identity and access management (IAM), node pool configuration, and resource efficiency.

Step 2: Add-Ons & Tooling with GitOps

• Automated deployment of essential Kubernetes add-ons (such as cert-manager, Istio, GCP-native monitoring and logging integrations, Goldilocks, and policy management tools) through modern GitOps workflows.

• GitOps enables declarative, version-controlled, and audit-ready cluster states, allowing safe, reliable expansion or rollback of changes while enhancing visibility and governance.

Step 3: Workload Onboarding

• Fairwinds’ proven paved-road onboarding process enables seamless migration of workloads into your GKE clusters—including robust role-based access control (RBAC) enforcement, adoption of Kubernetes and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) best practices, and automated security guardrails.

• Comprehensive support for production workloads ensures every migration and deployment is seamless, predictable, and secure.

Step 4: Expansion Bundles

• Options to expand your GKE footprint: multi-cluster scaling, hybrid-cloud or edge deployments, and advanced workload isolation strategies.

• Enterprise-grade 24/7 support, automated cluster upgrades and patching, incident response, and managed vulnerability (CVE) handling—so your team can sleep through the night while Fairwinds ensures uptime, security, and compliance.

By partnering with Fairwinds for GKE managed services, your organization gains secure, repeatable GKE cluster deployments, simplified onboarding, and long-term operational excellence. Our approach combines automation, Google best practices, a consistent onboarding process, and access to Kubernetes and GCP experts—delivering speed, resilience, and peace of mind at every stage of your GKE journey.