Who are you, and what is your role within Cyso?
I am Timothy Verdonck, and I am a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at CYSO. This means that I proactively engage with clients using metrics, traces and logs to discuss how we can provide better insights into certain deployments or applications. We make agreements regarding specific indicators, and if necessary, we link follow-up actions to these.
For which project do you use Fuga Cloud?
At Cyso, we use Fuga Cloud for onboarding new clients onto the platform, due to the end-of-sale of VMware. For the old infrastructure, we now use the Managed Kubernetes part of Fuga, specifically the Gardener integration within OpenStack. The main reason we use it is for its lifecycle management. Within the SRE team, we found that manually updating lifecycle management within VMs costs us time and energy. The Managed Kubernetes service takes a lot of work off our hands, giving us peace and room for other tasks.
How do you find the EMK dashboard?
Quite convenient. All the elements I am familiar with from OpenStack are accessible and usable. It hasn’t happened to me yet, but if I were to miss something, I could still handle matters with the CLI if the dashboard isn’t sufficient.
What do you feel the dashboard is lacking in terms of functionality?
I would like to see an icon/tool-tip (i or ?) with an instructional text, video, or article from your Fuga Cloud Academy next to buttons like ‘create new cluster’, explaining what happens when you press that button. As an engineer, I know what will happen, but I can imagine that someone with a technical sales role would also like to know how it works this way.
Fuga is still working on making the control planes highly available, which not many VC’s offer.
Currently, it’s just a checkbox, and this cool feature isn’t highlighted in the GUI (graphical user interface). I think you’re being too modest about it.
What is your experience with Kubernetes?
I have been working intensively with Kubernetes for two years now. My background is primarily in the traditional VM domain, where I was heavily involved with containerisation. I have found that the Managed Kubernetes dashboard makes my life much more relaxed.
How do you rate the support from the Fuganeers?
Good. They are transparent in their communication. A technical explanation in a feedback response is helpful for me as an engineer, so I know what is being addressed. You can contact the Fuganeers via Slack, email, or WhatsApp.
Do you also use the support articles/documentation?
The Fuga Cloud Academy could be more prominently featured on the site, but I definitely use it.
Can you tell us what you really like about Fuga Cloud?
The strength of Fuga Cloud and OpenStack is that we can directly connect the compute part, where we might run databases, to Kubernetes. It’s all within the same ecosystem. There’s no need to engineer around it. We still have some databases in VMware, and I’d like to see that change. Fuga Cloud is a great solution for this.
Do you use any other clouds besides Fuga Cloud?
Personally, I have moved everything from Hetzner to Fuga Cloud. But Fuga Cloud is certainly usable in a multi-cloud strategy. You can set up so-called tunnels to another cloud environment.
Do you have any tips for the Fuga team?
In EMK, you could offer a test deployment option. With one click, a test deployment (such as a WordPress environment) could be set up within Fuga Cloud. It would be great if it could be done across multiple regions, but that might be something for the future. But with the basics as they are now, I am satisfied.
