One month to hassle-free Kubernetes: Lens Autopilot implementation timeline

Maybe you’ve had a hard time hiring and retaining staff with DevOps and Kubernetes skills. Or perhaps your developers dread Kubernetes’ complexity, and you want them to focus on building business-focused applications. Whatever your reasons, managing DevOps and Kubernetes is a burden that many companies don’t want to carry. That’s why Mirantis is proud to offer Lens Autopilot, a complete DevOps-as-a-Service solution that can remove your Kubernetes headaches and accelerate cloud ROI — all with guaranteed outcomes in 12 months or less, including the technical ability to achieve a 5x-10x increase in application deployment speed, 75% reduction in security vulnerabilities, faster time to remediation, and 2x-4x reduction in operational costs.

Even better, Mirantis can get Lens Autopilot up and running for your organization in only 4 weeks. Our structured timeline enables us to implement Lens Autopilot as fast as possible with the customizations you need. To give you a more concrete picture of what Lens Autopilot entails and how it’s deployed, we’ve shared our typical implementation timeline below, including the specific deliverables and tooling for each stage.

We start off Lens Autopilot by evaluating your current setup and quickly laying the groundwork for remote services and collaboration. During the first two days, we’ll assess your systems and processes, documenting any gaps that need to be fixed. We’ll also establish remote access for Mirantis site reliability engineers and install or upgrade Lens, the Kubernetes IDE at the heart of Lens Autopilot that will become the command and control center for your deployments. 

To foster team collaboration, we’ll create a space for your developers within Lens Teamwork, a cloud service that enhances Lens with secure cluster sharing and access control. If you need to set up a CI/CD process, we’ll do so using GitHub and GitHub Actions or Jenkins, placing all your code and configurations in a version control system.

At the end of the first two days, we’ll have a single window into all the cluster resources in your shared space, where Mirantis site reliability engineers will be able to remotely monitor the status of all your Kubernetes clusters and applications, identify errors and issues, then fix them directly within Lens.

After we lay the groundwork in the first two days, it’s time to establish a unified dashboard for monitoring resilience and security compliance. Mirantis site reliability engineers will set up Prometheus and Grafana to keep tabs on application and cluster health, customizing metrics for your business requirements. For security compliance, we’ll install best-of-breed tools to safeguard critical components, including Starboard for your clusters and applications, Falco for your container runtime, Conftest for namespaces, and Krane to manage and visualize your RBAC model. 

To get your staff ready, we’ll present an in-depth walkthrough of Lens and Lens Teamwork, grant access to our customer support portal, and start onboarding your clusters to Lens Teamwork. For comprehensive, hands-on technical training, we also include our on-demand Cloud Native Operations Bootcamp and Cloud Native Development Bootcamp with annual Lens Autopilot subscriptions.

Moving along to the second week of implementation, Mirantis site reliability engineers will provide professional guidance to ensure your Kubernetes applications are resilient for production. We’ll provide an in-depth assessment of your deployed applications, helping you select the right images and governance policies. If we detect any security issues, we’ll remediate them and set up proactive maintenance through policies and controls to prevent security misconfigurations, reduce risks and improve security compliance. We’ll validate and debug your applications, so you can have confidence they’ll run reliably in production.

To ensure maximum uptime for your clusters and applications, we’ll also configure automated 24x7 alerts for real-time monitoring of cluster health, application health, application configurations, certificate issues, etc. We’ll use AlertManager and k8s-notify monitoring and notification software, integrating them with the Mirantis customer support system, Slack, and email for efficient tracking and communications. All this tooling helps to speed up application delivery by giving developers rapid feedback on code and to boost application availability by detecting risks early for fast remediation.

By the end of Week 2, your developers will be confident and self-sufficient to provision their own sandbox environments using Lens Kubernetes, based on the lightweight k0s distribution. We will also set up Kubernetes ingress using NGINX, so users can access your applications as a public service.

As we arrive to Weeks 3 and 4 of Lens Autopilot implementation, Mirantis site reliability engineers will work on accelerating your application deployments by using FluxCD or Argo CD for GitOps CI/CD automation. We’ll optimize your CI/CD pipelines for your specific applications, development processes, and approach to DevOps and include multi-branch GitOps support to automatically manage configuration drift. If you have Lens Autopilot Plus, we’ll also customize your GitOps automation workflows for your specific use case.

To proactively enforce audit compliance and security best practices, we’ll set up policy agents for each attached cluster. We’ll also enable and configure service mesh using Istio, which can provide additional security, observability, and traffic management capabilities. And for Lens Autopilot Plus customers who need tooling for cost and chargeback management, we can add KubeCost.

Best of all, our site reliability engineers and other experts will be on hand to help resolve issues, provide architectural expertise, or answer general questions about your deployment, saving you from time-consuming troubleshooting and analysis. We’ll also provide strategic guidance for growth, leveraging Goldilocks for capacity analysis, visualizations and planning for resource optimization, and assist with onboarding complex applications as needed. 

If there’s some other functionality you’d like to add, our platform engineers can help Lens Autopilot Plus customers evaluate and integrate CNCF tools by building custom resource definitions and operators and adding them to Lens Spaces.

Beyond the first month, Lens Autopilot will be fully up and running. You’ll have a hassle-free, 24x7x365 as-a-service experience of all the critical areas you need to succeed with DevOps and Kubernetes, including: monitoring and alerting, security, GitOps, platform engineering, and value-added services such as ingress and service mesh. Your company will be able to experience faster time to market for applications, greater application resilience and availability, reduced risks, and lower operational costs — all specified in guaranteed outcomes.

Ready to make life easier for your developers while also improving outcomes for your business? Contact us today.