Fleet unveils expanded multi-cloud features for servers

Fleet has announced the release of expanded, multi-cloud features aimed at enhancing observability capabilities for servers and Kubernetes containers, which promises to increase access to critical data from production environments.

Fleet is utilised by several major industry players such as Atlassian, Dropbox, and Roblox, and now supports some of the most powerful high-performance computing clusters globally. The newly introduced capabilities include Arm64+ support for servers and Kubernetes clusters, enhanced intrusion detection features, and accelerated compliance audit processes.

Mark Burgess, the author of CFEngine and initiator of Promise Theory, commented on the challenges related to infrastructure management, stating, "Configuring stuff is easy, but understanding the monster you've created is hard. This is why the challenges of infrastructure are all about knowledge management. Getting data is half the battle, and that's a big scaling challenge."

According to Fleet, the challenge in the current landscape is the ability to gather data without incurring performance penalties or causing disruptions. Charles Zaffery, Principal Infrastructure Engineer at Roblox, noted, "We're able to address reliability and compliance concerns without sacrificing a single point-of-a-percent of performance for our servers. All of this done consistently and continuously. Fleet is getting shown to our company board."

Fleet, built atop the osquery platform developed by co-founder Zach Wasserman, leverages its open-source roots to provide high levels of customisation and a scalable foundation for rapid deployment of new features. Recent updates include BPF events on Arch Linux, remote installation of RPM packages, and AI-powered security policy explanations.

Charles Zaffery further indicated the value of Fleet's data management, saying, "Fleet's extremely wide and diverse set of data allows us [Roblox] to answer questions that we didn't even know we had. On top of that, the experience is near instantaneous: Literally, seconds to sort through billions of data points and return the exact handful that we need, with complete auditing and transparency."

An example of Fleet's application in a large enterprise setting involved a security engineer at an electric vehicle manufacturer using the system to quickly identify vulnerable TPM chips across thousands of devices.

Another engineer from a Fortune 100 company shared his experience, stating, "We picked Fleet for the simplicity of rolling it out and the ability to integrate into our environment. Now, it is running on around 80,000 hosts internally at my company for threat detection, security reporting, and vulnerability management."

The open-source nature of Fleet enables customers to access the complete source code, differentiating it from proprietary solutions and facilitating easier adoption within enterprises. Mike McNeil, CEO and co-founder of Fleet, remarked on the transition from inadequate tools to embracing osquery, "Five years ago, I worked as a backend developer on an in-store payments product for the Fortune 1 company, and back then, there were a lot of late nights. We had nothing but buggy, in-house tools for doing deployments and checking up on servers, plus a few commercial products that someone had bought, but that no one actually used. The first time I met Zach and saw osquery, I realized this was going to change everything."