Kubernetes cluster management
Control plane, nodes, add-ons, upgrades, and workload support on upstream-style clusters.
Managed cluster services
Your VMs.
Your cluster.
Our watch.
Crafty Penguins takes ownership of day-to-day VM and cluster platform operations so your team can focus on building, not babysitting infrastructure.
VM
Guest OS lifecycle & patching
K8s
Control plane & upgrades
Virt
In-cluster virtualization
24/7
Monitoring & incident response
Where we operate
Cluster types we manage
Beyond generic "managed infrastructure," we run day-two operations on the platforms your team actually deploys, from upstream Kubernetes to specialized schedulers.
OpenShift cluster management
Red Hat OpenShift lifecycle, operators, and platform integration with your standards.
Proxmox cluster management
HA clusters, storage, backups, and guest VM operations on Proxmox VE.
Slurm cluster management
HPC-style job scheduling, partitions, and node health for research and batch workloads.
Docker Swarm cluster management
Swarm orchestration, service stacks, overlay networks, and rolling updates.
Core offerings
Two services.
One team.
Full operational coverage from nodes and the control plane through in-cluster virtualization and your guest OS, with clean boundaries so nothing falls through the cracks.
Service 01
Managed virtual machines on the cluster
Crafty Penguins owns the full lifecycle and day-to-day administration of your VM workloads running on Kubernetes-class clusters (including in-cluster virtualization where your stack supports it), from first boot to graceful retirement, with guest-level coverage aligned to our Linux managed services (TLC) tiers.
Scope of work
- VM lifecycle (cluster virtualization): provisioning, start/stop, resizing, retirement
- Guest OS maintenance & scheduled patching for Linux workloads
- Basic server & network monitoring with engineer-backed alert response
- File-level backups and database backups (SQL dump), coordinated with your tooling
- Resource usage tracking, CPU, memory, storage
- Incident response for VM- and guest-OS-level issues
- North American Linux engineers
- 50% off non-production servers
- Quarterly business reviews & basic monthly reporting
- Optional TLC Standard+ depth: application, DB & cronjob monitoring, managed config (Salt), security-focused add-ons (High Security)
Service 02
Managed cluster platform operations
We take responsibility for the stability, maintenance, and ongoing administration of the cluster control plane and nodes that host your workloads, including the virtualization layer when you run VMs on-cluster.
Scope of work
- Cluster provisioning and configuration management
- Upgrades, scaling, and version alignment
- Node health monitoring
- Storage integration and performance tuning
- Logging, metrics, and tracing (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki/ELK, Jaeger)
- Workload and job troubleshooting
- Autoscaling configuration management
- Identity management & authentication integration
Add-on offering
24×7 NOC add-on
Round-the-clock access to our NOC-qualified Linux engineers with a 1-hour response SLA. Built for teams that want phone-backed coverage on top of standard managed services. Read about 24×7 NOC Access
What you get
-
24/7 monitoring coverage After-hours NOC attention on your signals, not idle dashboards.
-
Phone reach to on-call engineers A direct line to qualified Linux engineers when minutes matter.
-
1-hour response SLA A contracted first-response window for qualifying incidents under this add-on.
Service boundaries
Clear scope.
No surprises.
VM management
What's in and out of scope
- VM workloads running on the cluster (in-cluster virtualization where used)
- Linux guest OS operations & patching
- VM-level monitoring and incident response
- Cluster control plane administration (separate service)
- Application-layer support above the OS
- Windows guest OS (unless separately contracted)
Platform operations
What's in and out of scope
- Kubernetes API & cluster control plane
- Cluster virtualization components (where deployed)
- Node health, networking, storage integration
- RBAC and platform security configuration
- Guest OS administration inside VMs
- Workload or application-specific support
How it fits together
Stack layers,
mapped to ownership.
Layer
Your application
Business logic & app code
Out of scope
←
Layer
Virtual machines
Guest OS · cluster VMs
VM management
←
Layer
Cluster platform
Control plane · nodes · add-ons
Platform ops
←
Layer
Nodes / bare metal
Physical or cloud infrastructure
Customer / cloud
Intended use cases
Built for teams
on the move.
Whether you're consolidating legacy infrastructure or modernizing toward containers, our services meet you where you are.
UC, 01
Managing legacy VM workloads
Keep your existing VM-based services running and maintained on-cluster, without lifting a finger on day-to-day ops.
VM managementUC, 02
Transition to container platforms
We support VM operations while your team migrates workloads toward containers, no rush, no gaps in coverage during the transition.
VM managementUC, 03
Consolidating VM workloads
Consolidate scattered VM infrastructure into a unified Kubernetes-class environment with full operational support from day one.
Both servicesUC, 04
Combined container + VM platform
Organizations running containers and VMs on the same cluster need a single team to own the whole platform layer.
Platform opsUC, 05
Cluster infrastructure ownership
Teams that want operational ownership of cluster infrastructure, patches, upgrades, capacity, and security, without building an internal SRE function.
Platform opsUC, 06
Hypervisor migrations
Environments moving from traditional hypervisors (VMware, Hyper-V) toward cluster-hosted virtualization gain a managed operational foundation from the start.
Both services