How BioCatch Replaced Rancher with Komodor to Support Large-Scale K8s Operations

About BioCatch

BioCatch is the leader in Behavioral Biometrics which analyzes an online user’s physical and cognitive digital behavior to protect individuals and their assets. BioCatch unlocks the power of behavior and delivers actionable insights to create a digital world where identity, trust, and ease seamlessly co-exist.

Leading financial institutions around the globe use BioCatch to more effectively fight fraud, drive digital transformation, and accelerate business growth. With over a decade of analyzing data, over 60 patents, and unparalleled experience, BioCatch continues to innovate to solve tomorrow’s problems.

The Challenge

BioCatch faced significant challenges in managing Kubernetes at scale, which impacted both efficiency and security. The team struggled with the effort required to manage cross-cluster access, including the toil associated with Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) configuration and the security risks inherent in distributing kubeconfig files. 

Additionally, the cost of Kubernetes management tools was a concern, prompting the need to reduce spending on Lens licenses by 70%. Maintenance demands were another pain point, as the team spent days each quarter maintaining Rancher, further straining resources. 

Finally, the heavy reliance on the DevOps team to address routine developer escalations underscored a lack of developer autonomy and ownership, highlighting the need for a solution to make developers more self-sufficient and reduce operational bottlenecks.

The Problem

BioCatch is required to handle sensitive customer requests on very low latency. The environment requires high standards of security and isolation between customers. Managing large-scale infrastructure across multiple locations around the world with such high availability requirements is extremely difficult. Just consider Day-2 Operations tasks, access management for BioCatch’s various engineering teams, and triaging cascading issues across over 120 clusters.

The previous solution BioCatch had was Rancher Dashboard, which couldn’t support the complexity and sheer scale of their environment.

The Solution 

Komodor addressed BioCatch’s Kubernetes management challenges with a comprehensive solution that streamlined operations, enhanced security, and empowered developers. By providing multi-cluster and cloud observability, Komodor offered a unified console to monitor resources across multiple clusters and cloud providers, such as AKS and EKS, drastically reducing the effort and complexity of cross-cluster access management.

With advanced resource management capabilities, the platform allowed the team to access critical Kubernetes resources like pod status, events, and logs while enabling direct remediation actions such as image updates, deployment scaling, and pod deletions. This eliminated much of the manual toil previously required and saved valuable time during issue resolution.

The Solution 

Komodor’s troubleshooting features centralized Kubernetes logs, events, and configurations, providing a clear view of changes across all clusters. Its ability to detect issues like CrashLoopBackOff and correlate historical data, including deployments and configmap changes, made pinpointing root causes faster and more effective. Actionable insights and step-by-step recommendations empowered developers to resolve issues independently, reducing the number of escalations to the DevOps team and promoting self-sufficiency across engineering teams.

The platform’s ease of use further accelerated user adoption. Its intuitive interface and clear workflows shifted the focus from navigating complex systems to resolving problems efficiently, making Kubernetes management less stressful and more productive for engineers of all skill levels.

Lastly, Komodor enhanced access management and security by enforcing RBAC policies, securing access down to the cluster and namespace level, and maintaining an audit log of user actions. These features not only reduced security risks associated with kubeconfig file distribution but also ensured compliance and accountability across the team. Together, these capabilities transformed Kubernetes operations at BioCatch, enabling a more scalable, secure, and developer-friendly approach.