Chkk emerged from stealth with its
Kubernetes Availability Platform that identifies and prioritizes availability
risks before they cause incidents and creates pre-verified upgrade plans to
remediate risks and speed up upgrades. The platform is powered by Chkk's
Collective Learning technology that mines, curates and programmatically
delivers operational knowledge to all developers. The platform is now generally
available and will be showcased next month at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America.
Torsten Volk, managing research director at Enterprise Management
Associates, said: "Kubernetes clusters are constantly moving targets when it
comes to minimizing the risk of outages. One seemingly minor mistake can cause
an impressive chain reaction of events leading to significant financial and
reputational damage. Chkk enables customers to enhance Kubernetes resiliency by
continuously scanning their environment for configuration mistakes,
incompatibilities, deprecations and other key risk factors is nothing short of
brilliant. Receiving continuous guidance from a data stream that allows the
organization to learn from the mistakes of others, constitutes an ‘insurance
policy' against outages, similarly to vulnerability scans by security
platforms. Very exciting indeed."
Organizations are rapidly adopting Kubernetes to build cloud-native
applications. However the realities of operating Kubernetes for
mission-critical applications is challenging due to its complex ecosystem of
thousands of components and talent is scarce, training is expensive and
troubleshooting is reactive, resource intensive and painful. While reactive
monitoring and alerting systems are a must for Kubernetes operations, teams
running Kubernetes also need a proactive approach to availability to prevent
incidents from happening in the first place.
Awais Nemat, co-founder and CEO of Chkk, said: "Kubernetes has become the
de facto standard for cloud-native applications but it is complex to operate.
Running mission-critical applications on Kubernetes requires teams to navigate
a convoluted maze of open source, vendor-managed and cloud provider add-ons
with intricate dependencies and bespoke release cycles. Even the best teams
struggle to keep their infrastructure stable, well-configured and fault-free
because there's just so much to keep track of. Chkk's Kubernetes Availability
Platform gives teams the superpowers to learn from others' mistakes. They
receive advance warning of risks, along with comprehensive details and specific
plans to help them prioritize and fix these flaws. With Chkk, they can feel
confident that known risks have been detected and addressed, faster and with
less effort."
Chkk's Kubernetes Availability Platform identifies and prioritizes
availability risks before they cause incidents, catalogs fleet-wide resource
versions and creates pre-verified upgrade plans to remediate risks and speed up
upgrades. The platform covers Kubernetes services from all public clouds as
well as on-premises and edge deployments with three modules:
- Risk Ledger that identifies, prioritizes and addresses
availability risks that cause errors, failures and disruptions
Gus Robinson, platform architect at Yoti, said: "Despite having an expert
team with years of Kubernetes experience at Yoti, tracking add-on
versions, EOLs, release notes and breaking changes across dozens of CNCF
projects is very time-consuming. Chkk's Availability Risk Ledger gives us
this information on our fingertips, enabling us to prevent risks that have
led to incidents, failures and disruptions for others. Not only does Chkk
save us from downtime but more importantly it saves us time."
- Artifact Register that discovers and maps all container
images, registries, tools, control planes, add-ons and applications across
a Kubernetes fleet
Stephan Massalt, SVP of service platform operations at AlefEdge, said: "I
had to dedicate significant engineering time to track what Chkk now
delivers through Artifact Register. I wish I had met the team last week as
we hit one of these risks, and it took 4 hours to debug. With Chkk, we
improve infrastructure continuity by tracking latent risks, locating where
they exist and remediating them proactively."
- Upgrade Copilot that plans and executes cluster, add-on
and application upgrades safely via pre-verified upgrade plans
Matthias Winzeler, cloud architect at Nexoya, said: "Upgrading Kubernetes
and add-ons used to be a time-consuming and complex process. We had to go
through extensive release notes and compatibility checks and worry about
potential issues. Chkk's Upgrade Copilot cuts down weeks of pre-work to
just two days and their pre-verification ensures safe upgrades. Now we can
perform upgrades efficiently and without disruptions, saving us time and
resources."
Chkk's Collective Learning Technology
Chkk's platform is powered by its Collective Learning technology which lets
teams programmatically and collectively learn from each other and comprises:
- Availability Risk Signature Database that discovers,
curates and codifies new availability risks that have caused errors,
failures and disruptions for other teams
- Knowledge Graph that learns changes happening across
hundreds of Kubernetes projects and models the impact of these changes to
discover the safest upgrade paths
- Detectors that track thousands of container
images, operational tools, configurations and dependencies to catalog what
is running in a Kubernetes fleet
Chkk's research team reviews and curates risks to make them
actionable.