Chkk recently emerged from stealth with its Kubernetes Availability Platform – which identifies and prioritizes availability risks before they cause incidents and creates pre-verified upgrade plans to remediate risks and speed up upgrades. And the company also recently announced that it raised $5.2 million in seed funding led by Sequoia Capital. Chkk plans to use the funding to advance its platform and modules and expand its team.
And the platform is powered by Chkk’s Collective Learning technology that mines, curates, and programmatically delivers operational knowledge to all developers. The platform is generally available and will be showcased next month at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America.
Organizations have been rapidly adopting Kubernetes to build cloud-native applications. However, the realities of operating Kubernetes for mission-critical applications are challenging due to its complex ecosystem of thousands of components, and talent is scarce, training is expensive, and troubleshooting is reactive, resource intensive, and painful. As reactive monitoring and alerting systems are a must for Kubernetes operations, teams running Kubernetes also need a proactive approach to availability to prevent incidents from happening in the first place.
Chkk’s Kubernetes Availability Platform identifies and prioritizes availability risks before they cause incidents, catalogs fleet-wide resource versions, and creates pre-verified upgrade plans to remediate risks and speed up upgrades. And the platform covers Kubernetes services from all public clouds as well as on-premises and edge deployments with three modules:
1.) Risk Ledger that identifies, prioritizes, and addresses availability risks that cause errors, failures, and disruptions
2.) Artifact Register that discovers and maps all container images, registries, tools, control planes, add-ons, and applications across a Kubernetes fleet
3.) Upgrade Copilot that plans and executes cluster, add-on, and application upgrades safely via pre-verified upgrade plans
Chkk’s platform is powered by its Collective Learning technology – which lets teams programmatically and collectively learn from each other and comprises:
— Availability Risk Signature Database that discovers, curates, and codifies new availability risks that have caused errors, failures, and disruptions for other teams
— Knowledge Graph that learns changes happening across hundreds of Kubernetes projects and models the impact of these changes to discover the safest upgrade paths
— Detectors that track thousands of container images, operational tools, configurations and dependencies to catalog what is running in a Kubernetes fleet
Chkk’s research team reviews and curates risks to make them actionable.
Chkk was founded by Awais Nemat (CEO), Fawad Khaliq (CTO) and Ali Khayam (CPO) – who worked together for more than a decade and, most recently, launched planet-scale services for AWS – from Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to services that controlled all traffic in/out/across Amazon’s network infrastructure, including traffic for AWS, Amazon.com, Prime Video, Alexa and FireTV. There, the trio experienced firsthand how critical a proactive approach to availability is for mission-critical services, which inspired them to democratize this knowledge for the worldwide developer community.
KEY QUOTES:
“Kubernetes clusters are constantly moving targets when it comes to minimizing the risk of outages. One seemingly minor mistake can cause an impressive chain reaction of events leading to significant financial and reputational damage. Chkk enables customers to enhance Kubernetes resiliency by continuously scanning their environment for configuration mistakes, incompatibilities, deprecations and other key risk factors is nothing short of brilliant. Receiving continuous guidance from a data stream that allows the organization to learn from the mistakes of others, constitutes an ‘insurance policy’ against outages, similarly to vulnerability scans by security platforms. Very exciting indeed.”
— Torsten Volk, managing research director at Enterprise Management Associates
“Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for cloud-native applications but it is complex to operate. Running mission-critical applications on Kubernetes requires teams to navigate a convoluted maze of open source, vendor-managed and cloud provider add-ons with intricate dependencies and bespoke release cycles. Even the best teams struggle to keep their infrastructure stable, well-configured and fault-free because there’s just so much to keep track of. Chkk’s Kubernetes Availability Platform gives teams the superpowers to learn from others’ mistakes. They receive advance warning of risks, along with comprehensive details and specific plans to help them prioritize and fix these flaws. With Chkk, they can feel confident that known risks have been detected and addressed, faster and with less effort.”
— Awais Nemat, co-founder and CEO of Chkk
“Despite having an expert team with years of Kubernetes experience at Yoti, tracking add-on versions, EOLs, release notes and breaking changes across dozens of CNCF projects is very time-consuming. Chkk’s Availability Risk Ledger gives us this information on our fingertips, enabling us to prevent risks that have led to incidents, failures and disruptions for others. Not only does Chkk save us from downtime but more importantly it saves us time.”
— Gus Robinson, platform architect at Yoti
“I had to dedicate significant engineering time to track what Chkk now delivers through Artifact Register. I wish I had met the team last week as we hit one of these risks, and it took 4 hours to debug. With Chkk, we improve infrastructure continuity by tracking latent risks, locating where they exist and remediating them proactively.”
— Stephan Massalt, SVP of service platform operations at Alef Edge
“Upgrading Kubernetes and add-ons used to be a time-consuming and complex process. We had to go through extensive release notes and compatibility checks and worry about potential issues. Chkk’s Upgrade Copilot cuts down weeks of pre-work to just two days and their pre-verification ensures safe upgrades. Now we can perform upgrades efficiently and without disruptions, saving us time and resources.”
— Matthias Winzeler, cloud architect at Nexoya
“In the same way an X-ray scans the human body to identify, diagnose and treat physical ailments, Chkk’s technology X-rays lurking availability risks in Kubernetes environments. As more and more mission-critical apps land on Kubernetes, its uptime and availability is of paramount concern for DevOps and platform engineering teams. Chkk is an innovative and indispensable technology that is a must for today’s infrastructure teams. Awais, Fawad and Ali are a founding dream team. With over a decade of experience working together to empower global developer communities by ensuring mission-critical services remain available, their technical prowess and true understanding of the challenges that DevOps and platform engineering teams are up against today is unmatched. We look forward to watching them take off.”
— Bogomil Balkansky, partner at Sequoia Capital
