How Cowbell Used Komodor to Build Enterprise-Scale Infrastructure 

About Cowbell

Cowbell is the leading provider of cyber insurance for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the pioneer of Adaptive Cyber Insurance. Cowbell delivers standalone cyber coverage tailored to the unique needs of each business. Their innovative approach relies on AI for continuous risk assessment and continuous underwriting while delivering policyholders a closed-loop approach to risk management with risk prevention, risk mitigation, incident preparedness, and response services.

The Challenge

Cowbell’s business goals are tied directly to its development velocity. The infrastructure team at Cowbell understood that establishing a strong foundation is crucial for startups looking to scale up. Cultivating a culture of service ownership is key, shifting away from heavy developer reliance on assistance. The goal is to become a scalable organization where developers can self-service and aren’t dependent on one team. 
This approach empowers developers to take responsibility, deploy, monitor, and troubleshoot independently. It accelerates innovation, fosters accountability, and optimizes resource utilization. A solid foundation sets the stage for sustained success and adaptability as the startup grows.
To make this vision a reality, much of the daily operations had to be offloaded to developers, but allowing devs to interact directly with their cluster without proper guardrails was scary and too risky for all parties involved. The inability to let devs roam free meant that Cowbell couldn’t scale their engineering team without scaling operations as well.   

The Problem

Cowbell confronted a significant hurdle: the steep learning curve of Kubernetes. Onboarding developers to Kubernetes proved to be a daunting task due to its complex architecture and intricate concepts. Even learning the basics of Kubernetes required too much time and effort, and proved to be a heavy cognitive load on developers.
Historically, developers would write their applications and then hand them over to the operations team for Kubernetes deployment and monitoring. Consequently, they faced the frustrating prospect of waiting for the operations team to complete the deployment and provide results, leading to a slow and inefficient process. 

The operations team, however, wasn’t happy either as they were spending most of their time doing menial K8s tasks or troubleshooting minor issues instead of scaling and optimizing Cowbell’s infrastructure for costs and performance.  If an issue occurred, the team had to meticulously examine logs and consult five or six different tools, which often resulted in hours of tedious investigation.
These cumulative challenges highlighted the pressing need for improved developer experience, streamlined workflows, consolidated tooling, and effective onboarding mechanisms to enhance efficiency and effectiveness across the organization. 

The Solution 

Komodor played a pivotal role in overcoming Cowbell’s challenges and building a robust foundation for a secure, reliable, and scalable product. 
With a unified platform offering a centralized multi-cluster, multi-cloud view, Komodor provided Cowbell with a comprehensive and holistic perspective of its Kubernetes environment. This eliminated the need to navigate through disparate tools, such as Datadog, Sumo Logic, Prometheus, Grafana, and Kubectl, as all the necessary information was consolidated into a single platform.

Komodor’s historical timeline feature proved to be invaluable for Cowbell when it came to root-cause analysis and troubleshooting. This feature allowed the team to quickly pinpoint and address issues by providing a detailed timeline of events, significantly reducing the time and effort required for investigations.
Additionally, Komodor provided secure access through role-based access control (RBAC) and maintained a complete audit trail, ensuring the integrity and security of the system.
One of the key benefits of Komodor was its straightforward and user-friendly interface, designed to be easily understood by developers of all skill levels. This allowed Cowbell’s developers to quickly comprehend and navigate the platform without requiring extensive assistance, enabling Cowbell’s developers to take e2e ownership of their services. 
The platform offered a fast and easy self-serve setup process, resulting in zero time to value and eliminating the need for additional maintenance. This allowed Cowbell’s engineers to focus on their core tasks, accelerating the development and deployment of their applications.“>The Solution

ROI

“The return on investment is excellent! The biggest factor in the ROI is the reduction in developer hours. We are replacing Datadog with Komodor, which is cheaper and offers similar functionality, but with some additional features. This will save us money in terms of the cost of the subscription, as well as the time that developers spend troubleshooting issues. 
In addition, Komodor’s self-service capabilities will free up our operations team to focus on other tasks. Based on our estimates, we will save enough time in the first month to cover the cost of the subscription. As a result, we expect to see a positive ROI within the first year of using Komodor.”

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