Fairwinds’ Andy Suderman on Kubernetes Expertise, AWS Partnership, and Advancing Insights with MCP

Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimo. Welcome to CubeCon North America 2025, or some people call it Cloud Native Con, or as I called it, way too long a line to get in here today. They gotta do a better job.

During COVID when they were checking vaccines, it wasn't this long a line, there was no reason for it. I waited 45 minutes to get in here today, so I don't know if it's an a TL thing or an a TL cloud native thing, but we expect better anyway. Now we started early, so I had some time to kill with that.

Let me introduce you to our first guest here from the show floor at Q Con. Andy Suman. Andy, you may, if you, if you're a fan of Tech strong learning events and webinars, you might have seen Andy.

He's done more than a few with us. Um, Andy is with Fairwinds, and don't worry if you don't know Fairwinds, we're going to make sure you know him after this. Andy, welcome to our coverage.

Thanks for being our first guest. Thanks for having Me. You wait online this morning?

I did. I'm glad I made it here in time for the interview. Yeah, me too.

I was not sure I was gonna make it. It was a little crazy. Anyway, Andy, I said you're with, uh, Fairwinds, but tell us a little bit of kind of what your role at Fairwinds is and how you came to Yeah.

To that position. Yeah, Definitely. So, I, I've been a long time infrastructure guy.

I've worked in infrastructures, worked on infrastructure basically since I was a kid. And, um, about nine years ago at my previous company, I got into Kubernetes. Was really excited about it.

It was very early days. And then I joined, at the time, reactive ops was the name of the company. What was the name?

Reactive Ops. React after Ops after Reactive Manifesto, which many Cool people know about. Very.

All right. Uh, little Trivia right there. Yeah.

Yeah. So we, we built and maintained Kubernetes infrastructure for other companies, and I've been doing that ever since, uh, for the last seven and a half years. Uh, working with Fairwinds As part of delivering services is an AWS partner as well.

Yes, We are, uh, an AWS advanced tier partner at the moment. Um, and we've been working closely with them for many years the entire time, but over the last couple years, we've really strengthened that partnership. The majority of our customers are on AWS Uh, we are, we also operate across all three clouds, but AWS is definitely the lion's share of that and Very cool.

Yeah. So, you know, I know a little bit about Fair Ones, but let's assume the audience out here doesn't, you guys, I mean, number one, Kubernetes experts first and foremost, right? Some of the number One thing.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean that's, I, I've listened in on a lot of the webinars.

As I mentioned, the, the, the knowledge and skill gap for Kubernetes infrastructure deployments is, is second to none. Um, but as you said, you work with all the different cloud environments. You work with a law, a big range of software, including a lot of open source tools.

Yes. Yeah. We actually have several of our own that are very popular.

Goldilocks Yep. Is something you guys have have, and it's open source, anyone. Yep.

You don't have to be a, a Fairwinds customer to use Goldilocks. And, and that's yet another interesting thing about fairwinds, right? As you guys are developing the tools that you use for your customer engagements, you actually open source them so then anyone could use them, which is pretty cool.

Yeah. Yeah. We really enjoy, you know, sharing the knowledge that we have back with the community, not just in the form of services, but also in the form of open source.

Uh, Another, I love that One of our major projects is, um, Pluto. So if anybody went, lived through the Kubernetes one 16 upgrade, and all of those APIs got removed, uh, at the time it was very hard to tell if you were still using those APIs. And so we wrote Pluto to help with that.

And I think today it still helps a little bit. It's not as big of a problem as it used to be, but APIs get deprecated and removed all the time. It doesn't change.

So I I, I would bet it against it. Not, well, I wouldn't bet against it not being a problem At some point, I'm sure In the future, again, with APIs and AI and MCO server. What about MCO servers?

What are you doing with them? MCP servers, MCP, excuse me. Yeah.

Um, not a ton at the moment. We do have an MCP server kind of in the works for our product that we use to do. Of course you do.

Everyone has What the cost, I mean, yeah, it's kind of table stakes at this point. Yeah. So our, uh, software product, Fairwinds Insights, which all of our customers use to get insight about their, their, uh, clusters, and they'll be able to access that via MCP here in the, you know, within the next year or So.

Of course, MCO came before MCP, and I guess soon you'll have M-C-Q-R-R, but, Um, Uh, Andy, for people who want to get more information on Fairwinds, where do they go? com, uh, go to our GitHub where all of our open source lives, that's Fairwinds ops is the company on GitHub. Uh, those are the two primary ways to get ahold of us.

We all also have an open source Slack community, uh, that you can join. It's on any one of the read mes on our projects. Excellent.

Alright. If you don't mind, I want to kind of pivot a little bit and talk about recent, uh, development, recent announcement with you guys partnering with AWS Yeah. In the, you know, in the platform engineering space, right?

Yeah. You guys are, uh, partnering with AWS on a new IDP offering, internal development platform offering. Yep.

Internal developer platform offering. Tell us about it. Yeah, so we've always managed the base level of infrastructure, but our customers often need something above that.

So it's always been, it's your job to deploy your applications and do your CICD and these days, um, I think there's a need really for, you know, platforms internally for platform teams to be able to deliver clusters and deployments and standard path happy paths to their developers. And so AWS has built, uh, sort of a blueprint for this with a whole bunch of different open source projects. So we've got Argo workflows, Argo cd, backstage, cross plane, all put together in this really nice package.

And so what we are starting to do is we are offering this as a services offering to our customers. So we'll come in, set that up, build the, you know, kind of control plane cluster for you, give you all the patterns that you need, help you deploy your first application through the platform, and then hand that off to you. Or we can manage it long term with our standard managed services, but really it's about zero to 60 on a platform in a very short amount of time.

And so, you know, there's a few different flavors of backstage. There's open source Backstage, and then we have, you know, uh, I think Spotify still has, they have one they productized. Yep.

It was their, you know, they pioneered it. I'm not, I'm not banging them for it or Anything. Oh, no, absolutely.

But, um, how, how does this offering stack up to some of the commercial backstage offerings? Um, I'm not entirely familiar with all of them. You know, there are, there's a lot a few out there, right?

There's a lot. Um, but really this is truly based on the open source. They're also working closely with the, uh, canoe effort, uhhuh, um, to really build this fully open source.

And so I think as with all open source, what you'll get is ultimate configurability. You'll be able to do anything with it you want, but it will be a little bit more complex than using an off the shelf solution. Yeah.

So it really, It's not, it's not as pretty maybe. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's where we come in. We're gonna come in and help you make it as pretty. So I think once we are done delivering this open source to you, I think it'll stack up really well against those paid offerings, Really.

Yeah. UI and everything else. Absolutely.

Yep. Very cool. And now that's an offering you're doing with AWS Yes.

As an AWS partner, we're working with them to deliver that. They're the ones who are they picking, like besides Backstage, you mentioned that's some GI ops and some other stuff. They're the ones picking that, or does the customer get to put anything they want in there?

So they've picked kind of the core pieces of it, and then there are certain parts of it that the customer will be able to pick and choose and swap in and out, because there's an entire, um, off solution built into it. So at the moment, the open source uses key cloak, but obviously not everybody's gonna use Key Cloak for SSO. So there'll be plug and play options for SSO for your code repositories.

So we'll be able to do GitLab or GitHub or Git or any of the other, you know, kind of flavors of that. Very cool. So it'll be a little bit of both.

And then because they have you doing their service, if they want to add other things that maybe even aren't in the core, right? Yeah. We can add things on, we can help to customize it.

You know, everything we do is very, uh, highly tailored to our customers. Right, right. You know, obviously for operational reasons, we try to keep them similar.

We use best practices everywhere, right. It's special scalability. Sure.

We are a very high touch service, and we really wanna make sure our customers get the, the platform that they need for them that fits them, which is why I think a lot of off the shelf platforms don't work because they're not custom tailored, but then building your own takes so much time. com days, you probably weren't there. I wasn't working.

No, no, I, I realized this when I was talking to someone. The other, they said, yeah, I was in high school. com days, I helped start a company that was what we call an a SP application service provider and back.

This is before this cloud, before this hypervisor, all that stuff. Yeah. And, uh, we were offering Lotus Notes, which you probably have heard.

I, I've heard of what? Yes. Lotus Notes, PeopleSoft, Oracle, bunch of like major enterprise Onyx or CRM and stuff.

Major enterprise, uh, um, applications. Right. And the rule of thumb we learned then it was in 80 20.

No one just takes some app like that and just plugs it in and runs. There's always about 20% that needs to be, our mics are good for that. There's always about 20 cent, 20% of customization that needs to be done.

I don't think that's changed. I don't think so either. In fact, I think the percentage might be higher when you get into Open source.

Really? Yeah, maybe with open source. 'cause it is, you may not have UIs and also you just have a lot more, uh, options and you know, if you want it to be green on Mondays and blue on Tuesdays with open source, you could do that.

Yep. Excellent. Yeah.

Andy, I don't know if we mentioned the website for Fairwinds. Did we? Uh, I'm not sure We did.

com. It's very simple. Very simple.

Yep. Guys, so take it from me here. Shimmy.

com. Andy, it's great to see you in person after, after always seeing you on those little webinar sprints. Same thing.

We're gonna take a break. We're live here at Kon Cloud Native Con, we'll be back. We've got a full opening day here, so stay tuned.