Andy Suderman on Scaling Kubernetes, Data Management, and Cloud-Native Challenges | AWS re:Invent 2025

Hey, everyone. We're back here with our day three last day coverage of, uh, our time at AWS Reinvent. Uh, this guy's no stranger to our tech strong audience.

He's always either on a webinar showing him how to use Kubernetes, trying to make Kubernetes easy. Some say that's an impossible dream. Um, or on Techstrong TV, talking Cloud native and UB with me, he's my friend Andy Erman of Fairwinds.

Andy's, great to see you. Good To see you. Thanks for Having me.

You know, for people who haven't caught you before on either tech drunk TV or any of the webinars, give 'em a little bit of your background. Yeah, Sure. So I'm a long time infrastructure guy.

I've spent, well, my entire career working in infrastructure. I've spent the last nine years working exclusively with Kubernetes. Uh, now I'm the CTO at Fairwinds, and we help people run Kubernetes.

We try to make it easy, like you said, And like I said, in some cases it could be a bit of an impossible task. But, you know, it's, it's funny, Andy, we, you know, we're, we're sponsored by ser uh, you're Sudman we're sponsored by suse. You're at, it's the last day.

I'm getting a little punchy. It's, uh, it's a Long, Uh, you know, we're sponsored by Susa at, at, at here at AWS reinvent, and we've been spending a lot of time talking to the, uh, rancher guys about multi cluster Gotcha. Kubernetes management.

I'm sure that's something that's near and dear to you. Yeah, I mean, we manage quite a few clusters for all of our customers. We're familiar with rancher, lots of, um, lots of multi cluster stuff.

I think, you know, the one question we all have to ask is, um, where's the data live, right? Yeah. Everybody was there.

Like, we wanna go multi-region, we wanna go multi cluster. And I say, that's great. Where's your data gonna live?

Because that's the thing that's harder to move between clusters. I, I agree with you, and especially in a world of data sovereignty and, and all of those things that you're dealing with, right? Absolutely.

But you know, what I found, and, and maybe, and I might be wrong 'cause I'm not the expert you are, but a lot of time multi cluster Kubernetes happens quite by accident, right? You are, you are doing a Kubernetes project over here and you spin up a cluster. I'm, we're in the same company, we just don't talk.

Yeah. I spin one up over here. Jill spins one up there, Bob and Harry over there.

And before you know it, damn, we got four Kubernetes clusters we're managing, but they're all kind of standalone. But you know, okay, now we gotta get efficient and we want to bring 'em together. Yep.

So I, I call that like the accidental multiple Kubernetes cluster. Yeah. We have a name for it.

Uh, our sales team knows this term. It's cluster proliferation problem. Uh, CPP.

Yeah. Yeah. So, okay.

We run into a lot of folks that have that, mostly large companies, lots of teams, different business units. They end up with a vast number of clusters. The cost gets outta control.

Um, and usually when we work with those folks, we work with them to consolidate into a platform. And so their end goal is let's get down to a manageable number of clusters managed by us at Fairwinds, hopefully, um, and build a platform on top of that so that all of these developers aren't managing all of their own clusters. And the goal is let's make it easy for them while also getting control and governance and policy in place.

Um, it's a lofty goal, but, uh, it's can be very successful for folks. Absolutely. Wow.

Um, you know what, this was a good way though of introducing what Fairwinds does, and, and that You teed me right up. I I did not even realizing it, but, but that is the kind of the, the bread and butter of Fairwinds, right? You've got people who have these, uh, proliferating clusters Yep.

And you have people who are saying, Hey, I wanna modernize and move over, you know, from to a mo you know, maybe I'm going from VMware and I'm, I'm moving to another virtualized environment, but I want to go cloud native. I, you know, I want to go to a microservices architecture. Yeah, yeah.

Any architecture really, but yeah, microservices one, one way. Um, I had something I was gonna say and I lost It. It's okay.

We're live, so we just gotta keep rolling. So I'm gonna come up with something here for you then. Um, you know, I just recorded or played our shi my shimmy says that I do every week, a little 10 minute video on LinkedIn and X, but one of the, the, the theme of this week was, Hey man, DevOps cloud native and platform engineering are alive and well here at AWS reinvent.

And, and my thought was, you know, when I first got out here, I was just like, bowled over with all the agentic AI announcements. It seems like all AI all the time, right? Yeah.

And, um, but in talking to people and having conversations, you know, I'm hearing, well, one of the agentic AI agents Amazon came out was with the DevOps. They're calling it a DevOps agent. Mm-hmm.

I don't know if I'd call it a DevOps agent just yet, but, but they have plans. They have big plans for it. Yeah.

But hearing a lot about DevOps, a lot about cloud native, right? Cloud native is the choice. If you're looking for transformation modernization, you wanna move maybe from on-prem to the cloud.

Not all the way you wanna do a hybrid, you want to, you know, um, cloud native has had a strong showing here at the show and, and platform engineering is no longer a fad or a niche. It's, it, I think it's taken its place alongside the other two and, Hey, this, this is how we build software. Yeah.

How we run software. Absolutely. Absolutely.

You know, I, I think at Cube Gun we talked about, we've launched a product to help people build those internal platforms, and it's entirely based on cloud native software, because we really believe that is the future of platform and where it's going. And I think we could see it from Amazon as well with the announcement of the managed AR OCD and Crow Yeah. Act or a CK, um, you know, they're doubling down on Cloud native as well.

And so it's not going anywhere. It's here to stay and it will be, you know, the future of platform and DevOps engineering as we as we know It. You know, thinking back to the rancher announcement, what you just said is, is managed cloud native, the future, I mean, you guys manage for your clients, but you are also, you could come in, set 'em up and parachute back out, right?

Yeah, Absolutely. Um, now, I, I had a similar experience in the cyber. We didn't call it cyber the InfoSec space when I was there, which was after about 15 years, 10, 12 years, I realized that most organizations just weren't capable of managing their own security.

It was, they didn't have the, they didn't have the budget, they didn't have the expertise. And quite frankly, they didn't have the stomach for it. Uh, are we at the same place in Cloud native?

I think so. With the larger companies, that's absolutely true. You know, a lot of our customers, it's, it's one of one or two of those three things.

It's either they don't have the time or the budget or the people that all generally rolls back to budget or they could do it, but they don't want to because they'd rather focus on business impacting things. And that's what we enable is, you know, let us do the things that you don't have the stomach for or don't care about, or don't have the time for, uh, and you can focus on your business. Right.

I've always had that philosophy of, you know, outsource what isn't your core competency. Yeah. I learned, I also learned that the hard way, the dot coms I had helped start a company.

We wound up going public. Uh, we were what they call an A SP application search. So there's no cloud, there's no like t three lines of your in the gut meow internet.

I remember this. And, um, we're, we're offering hosted Lotus Notes, Oracle, PeopleSoft. And, and the lesson we learned is if it's not core and critical, those are the two things, right?

Yeah. Something can be core to your, to your DNA, in your case, Kubernetes expertise, cloud native expertise or critical. Your business can't run without it.

It, you don't give up things that are core and critical. Right. If it's core or critical, you might give it up.

Right. If it's not core or critical, you absolutely should give it up. Yeah, absolutely.

Right? Because otherwise you're just wasting money. Yeah.

And I think for a lot of companies, the, the intricacies of managing a cloud native environment, managing any IT environment, if you're not an IT company, you know, it, it's hard. But Cloud native in particular, because, you know, Kubernetes really never came with a chimey uneasy kinda button. No.

No. Batteries were never included. No batteries.

Security were never included. There included. No.

Uh, crazy false was never included. So what, what kind of, uh, you, you guys have a presence on the floor and everything. Yep.

Yep. What, what kind of, what are you hearing from people? You know, one of the biggest surprises to me, um, this is the first time we've had a booth at Reinvent.

Mm-hmm. Um, and uh, in the past it's always been, you know, I always just kind of assumed that we'd get about 10, 15% of people using Kubernetes. That has changed, um, in absolutely this show show it's 85 90% of people really, You think it's that high That I talked to are using Kubernetes.

And maybe that's 'cause they're stopping by a booth that says Kubernetes on it. Well, but, uh, go figure. But I'm talking to so many more people that are using Kubernetes or planning to move to it from some other container orchestration or something like that.

So it's a huge number. Uh, it's, it's good to see That is that is, you know, I, so now you got me curious. I'm gonna have to ask everyone I talk to.

85 sounds really high. Yeah. Uh, like you said, confirmation bias on my part.

Yeah, No. You know, the big picture number I always am told is that about 15% of payloads on the cloud are cloud native. Hmm.

Now a lot of that is because it's legacy stuff, right? Yeah. Yeah.

I'm sure there's quite a lot still that, you know, people aren't talking about. Um, and it's also that, you know, I've said this in the past is that they're probably using Kubernetes, the company is, but what percentage of their workloads are running Are running it That's a smaller, and that You're right. That's, that's a real distinction because I think what it is is Greenfield products very well may be 85%.

Cool. Yeah, absolutely. I think So Brownfield, again, people may not have the stomach to do that transformation.

Right. Or the need, I mean Right. Don't break what's not, If it's not broken, don't fix it.

Yeah. Don't fix what's not broken. Exactly.

Absolutely. Um, so this was your, I didn't realize this, this was Fair Wind's first time exhibiting here. Yeah.

Yeah. Coming back next year Probably. Yeah.

Yeah. Worth it. Good.

Good conversations. Good customers. Yep.

Yeah. Good show for you. All the right people are here.

Yep. Really good, good conversations. And, you know, the parties are fun too.

The par, you know. Yeah. We did a, uh, a thing at the Sphere last night with you.

A wizard of ours was pretty cool. That's Cool. Yep.

Um, wanted to talk to you a little bit about, forget the AWS for a second Fairwinds. Yeah. Anything new coming down the pike you want to share?

Um, nothing that we didn't talk about at CubeCon, but I'd love to share, you know, our new product to IDP Quick start. So we are, I talked about a little bit a minute ago, but we are putting together with AWS, um, they've built an app mod blueprints repository that helps you build a platform from open source. Uh, they did a couple of sessions on it this week, A couple of workshops.

Yeah. We're gonna be running another one with them, uh, next week, I believe. com if anybody's looking.

Um, and we will show you the, the product that we're going to be building, which is get you started with a platform faster than you could probably build it yourself. 'cause the biggest problem with platforms is that people spend two, three years building a platform because it's such a complex task. And so AWS and Us together have made that much simpler, uh, kind of prepackaged it up for you, and then we can customize it to your business needs and then you can build on top of that to, to serve your developers.

So, I love it. Yeah. Anything else you want to share Now?

Alright, come to reinvent. It's a long week. It's fun, but, uh, it Is a long week, but I, uh, it's worth it.

You, you're heading home today? Tomorrow. Tomorrow.

Good for you. Yeah, me too. Yeah.

All right. Hey, you know what? We didn't mention Fairwinds website.

com. There you go. Andy.

It's always good to see you, man. I don't know when, uh, well, I'm not doing you, you guys don't do Q Con in Europe, do you? Uh, we will sometimes we'll have a person there, but we won't have a booth.

No, I'm actually, I'm not. Mike ards gonna cover Q Con Europe first. It's the same week as the RSA conference.

Oh. So I'm out in San Francisco that week. Gotcha.

But we'll talk, and you guys are always on with your webinars and everything else around There. We'll do something. All right.

Sounds good. Hey, we're live, we're at AWS reinvent on day three. We still got some great content coming up for you.

Great interviews. Stay tuned.