Danielle Cook and Liz Coolman, Fairwinds | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2022

This is Textron TV. All right. We're back from lunch with live here at Detroit Cube.

Con Club nativecon, you know one of my height and I don't say this just goes they're here one of my favorite companies who put on webinars ADD Tech strong Tech strong learning events, whatever. It's Fairwinds. We do about 400 webinars a year more and I I will honestly say some of the most interesting ones we get are from Fairways and I hope in today's interview.

You're gonna get an idea of why. This is so I want to introduce you to Danielle cook Liz Coleman. Did I get these right you didn't you got it right right from Fairwinds there black shark gonna let them introduce themselves.

Okay. Yeah. Why don't you go first?

Yep. So I'm Danielle cook. I work in a VP at Fairwinds responsible for making sure everybody knows everything about Fairwinds and coming up with, you know, the things we want to talk about to the industry what businesses need to get out of kubernetes all of that good stuff.

Yeah, and I'm Liz Kuhlman. I'm the product manager at Fairwinds. I am responsible for our insights offering which is our kubernetes governance and security platform.

Love it. All right, so you are responsible. For people understanding about Fairways.

Absolutely. I'm gonna throw it right out you did. Yeah, so that the challenge with kubernetes is that it's like this wild west of clusters and workloads and everything's ephemeral.

So you're environment is starting and stopping and it can get out of control and then when you have more devops teams coming and they're trying to enable their developers to use it it again gets out of control. So our governance platform Fairwinds inside looks just all that. It's supposed to be there as a support system for devops.

You can set up policies you can set up guard rails so that you're developers can get their applications to Market faster and they can do it with security in mind. They can do it with cost in mind so that you're not over running on cloud spend and with compliance in mind. So if you need if you're in a heavy like regulated industry like you need to comply with certain rules, and we let you build those rules in the platform and then again let your developers actually use the Act without your devops teams having to be a help desk, absolutely.

And you know back to what I was talking about before look. The truth is and I think you hit it on the head. But you said it very politely kubernetes is hard.

Yep. Kubernetes is is unless you're really a kubernetes expert and there are a few of them. Yeah, it's hard it's hard.

So anything you can do that gives you an edge that makes it easier that allows you to. Have you know a better grip on what's going on? No brainer.

Absolutely. Now we're here. This is the second day.

We're doing videos. I will tell you that this year the two biggest. Kind of Treads or key.

You know hot words Hot Topics. I'm hearing. security Control costs.

Absolutely. And they're kind of Linked In some ways right because they're all about you can't do either one of those without really having insight. Into what you got what's going on in you kubernetes environment?

Cloud native environment, whatever you want to call it. So, you know once you have that there's a lot of things you could do. Now you mentioned the inside is it called Fairwinds inside?

Yes, and it's a great way to kind of visibility insight into what you got going on. But you also announce some new. Yes, you wanna chat about our cost features.

Yeah. So on the topic of why kubernetes is just so difficult to navigate cost is no exception. Just given how Dynamic the scheduling of kubernetes is right.

You can have like multiple workloads sharing a node for example, and then another note about cost is that If you want to make changes to be more efficient and to save money and identify those opportunities that awareness needs to happen at all levels, right? So it's not just the executive that needs to care. It's these delivery teams that also need to make the appropriate adjustments and the appropriate provisioning for what they actually need in a way that also doesn't compromise the reliability.

Right? So those are kind of the areas that we touch as a platform in general. So the most exciting thing we just came out with is a new way to break down your costs and make recommendations in a more granular way because of how Dynamic this is we can now regular costs down by the workload and the actual container if you've got a multi-tenant set up we can also like compare namespaces with each other.

So really helping you identify your most costly expenses that that more granular level, but also if you need to build specific teams, You can also break down those aggregations that way as well. So we're excited to provide that level of transparency. Absolutely and that's the kind of insight and control you need to put it together.

I just want to make sure I don't give people wrong information you announce that yeah the show is it available it is now. Yeah, so, how do we how do well get our hands on this? com and you know that we have the insights free trial that you can get on and start using it.

We're actually gonna be releasing a free tier soon which will be free for for life where you can access this feature and try it out. So that's kind of exciting and that's what you're the hot seat. But yeah, that's okay, but I think what's really important is that phenobs has been a term with the cloud that is around for years and there's loads of people doing it really well and at large organizations, but kubernetes is this black hole of Finance.

And it's because of you know as listening to you Liz like there are a lot of details that the finance team doesn't know about kubernetes and they don't know the ins and outs of a namespace versus this workloader that and so what we're trying to do is make it present all the information. And then so the devops teams can actually educate the stakeholders on the finops team and everybody can understand what this is. So it's not this black hole.

Things can be changed optimized. We have one customer who uses the platform to make their business decisions about their applications. Sure, you know, I had a conversation with some folks earlier today on this very subject.

So it's really there's a two-way street here. The finops teams doesn't don't understand the intricacies of kubernetes. That's one on this side of the street the developers the devops teams the platform engineering teams, whatever you want to whoever you want to point that They don't necessarily understand the financial implications.

Yeah, I just want to try this and they spin it up. All right. I got one I needed on it.

I'll go put it in here. They don't shut it's like telling my kids to shut the lights. Yeah, right.

They don't shut the lights and I explain this to someone today, you know, there's a ruined physics that time only moves one way can't go backwards in time. I'm only moves forward. So to Cloud costs.

It seems absolutely what you they always go up. They like very rarely go down like once it's there. It's there.

It's not going away. and I think You know people think in finops, oh, I'm gonna reduce my cloud cost. Reducing your car crust would be great, but that's not actually it.

It's about at least understanding your Cloud costs. Maybe reducing the rate of increase getting a handle on it. Yes.

Well and you need to make sure that you know with developers they're going to not set limits. They're not gonna set the right necessarily configuration because they just want the app to get there and and be reliable. So they'll over provision.

Well, yeah, they turn every dial all the way to the right and so but sometimes that over provisioning is needed but maybe not all really on right and so you need to be able to adjust and look at it. And as you said like it might not be that the cost come down, but maybe if you can just set the Limit Oh, yeah, you're gonna slow it down. But also, you know, sometimes we have one example where a customer went out and configure something and you know a week later.

They had a 50,000 dollar Cloud build because it wasn't configured right? So it's real money don't know if we're not talking nickels and pennies. It's real money.

com. Yes. Yes, we could go on there.

We can get a free trial. You said yes soon to come soon here. Yes.

A free cheer a free tier a free tier. Yeah soon to come. All right.

Thank you so much. Thank you Daniel. I'm serious.

You guys do a great job. If you get a chance, check out a fair any of the Fairwinds webinars they're available on demand on our site as well. But I think the next one's coming up November 10th.

Yes, we're gonna be talking about security strategies for 20203. com. It's great company check them out.

We're live here in Detroit at kubecon. We'll be right back.