By Kendall Miller, President, Fairwinds
The benefits of Kubernetes have been
established, your business has decided to make the move to cloud native and you
are now uncovering all the complexity surrounding the platform. This complexity
can be overwhelming. Combined with a lack of confidence in your clusters, you
might be nervous about moving your first or fifth application to the platform.
Now is the point where you want help. You can
of course reach out to the fantastic community that exists around Kubernetes,
but will searching through documentation and reddit posts give you the confidence you need?
I've spent the last five years helping
companies adopt and maintain Kubernetes successfully. During that time, our
company has iterated between Kubernetes Professional Services to the other side
of the spectrum of Kubernetes Managed Services. If you are looking for help
with Kubernetes, at some point you'll be asking yourself, "What kind of help do
I need?"
Kubernetes
Professional Services
Professional services or
"consulting" refers to hiring an expert to solve a problem. The
problem can be almost any kind - help with taxes, where to invest, racking and
stacking servers. When you seek professional services, you are seeking
expertise from people who have faced a problem many times. The ideal person is
someone that can help you get it done faster or better than you would be able
to do it yourself.
There are a number of advantages with
professional services. You can micromanage what gets done, or ask for changes
until you're satisfied with it. You can tell them what to do and they do it
(even if it may not give you the best outcome). And the sky's the limit for
what you can find to be done.
The problem with professional services is that
many are paid by the hour. Those services may drag work out or make it overly
complicated to get paid more. A person in a professional service capacity is
incentivized to work exactly as long as it takes to complete the project and
get paid.
Another problem is around reliability. A
professional services comes in, builds something, it looks great, but when they
are done it falls apart. They are usually not on the hook for the long term
implications of what they've built.
With Kubernetes, you want to build a platform
for long-term stability. There are times when a professional service might
offer advantages such as when you are evaluating the platform or want a quick
start for a dev environment. If you are looking for on-going help from a
service that will get you production-grade clusters, a managed service might be
the way to go.
Kubernetes
Managed Service
While similar to professional services in that
there is often some up-front work done by an expert, a managed service tends to
focus more on offering you what they have and for you to decide if it will fit
your needs. This helps to align your needs with what the managed service
provides. The difference with a managed service is that they want to help you
build quickly, but also build something that will last. Usually a managed
service is a long-term engagement.
A managed service provider won't simply spin
up your first cluster and walk away; the service will help you build, manage
and upgrade a production-grade environment, using Kubernetes best practices.
Kubernetes managed service firms will build you something you can count on,
because they too want it to last.
A managed service should have more experience
than most in what it takes to actually run Kubernetes for a long time. It
should help you get to production faster and succeed for the long term because
it takes ownership of the ongoing outcomes. What's most fundamental is that a
managed service is humans helping other humans.
Finding
a Kubernetes Managed Service
If you are looking for a dev environment to
evaluate Kubernetes, I recommend looking at a quick start professional service
option. If you are looking for long-term help to plan, set up and manage
Kubernetes so you can focus on the services that make you money, a managed
service is the way to go.
When considering a Kubernetes managed service,
there are some key considerations. First, Kubernetes has only been around for
the last five years. Look for a managed service company that has grown up with
the technology and is completely dedicated to it. By doing so, you'll ensure
you get true Kubernetes expertise and that recommendations and implementations
have been battle-tested.
Next, look for a managed service that is
dedicated to the Kubernetes community. Check that they are contributing to open
source and perhaps even creating their own tools to address problems they face.
And make sure it is a true partnership-humans
helping humans-to get the best Kubernetes environment set up to meet your
business needs.
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About the Author
Kendall Miller, President, Fairwinds
Kendall
is president of Fairwinds, the Kubernetes enablement company. Kendall
was one of the first hires at Fairwinds and has spent the past 5 years making
the dream of disrupting infrastructure a reality, while keeping his finger on
the pulse of changing demands in the market and valuable partnership
opportunities.