Is 42on an independent company?
Not entirely. 42on is a part of “Fairbanks International Group”. Fairbanks International Group then again consists of 42on and Fairbanks as subsidiaries. At Fairbanks International Group we just love making complex IT-Infrastructures valuable for our customers using open source technologies such as Ceph, Kubernetes and OpenStack. Initially it all started out with Fairbanks, that fully focused on designing, maintaining and supporting OpenStack cloud compute solutions. Wanting to be more involved in the open source community we in turn, added 42on to our portfolio, that focuses on comparable services for Ceph cloud storage solutions. Both companies have their own and separate customers where they support either OpenStack, Kubernetes, Linux or Ceph. However, as these technologies are often both deployed for our customers, we sometimes share customers between our two companies. Now with cloud infrastructures increasingly focused on the integration of Kubernetes containerization, we see this happening even more.
Why is 42on part of Fairbanks International Group?
Being part of the Fairbanks International Group, provides customers of 42on access to all expertise’s in our company, ranging from OpenStack or Kubernetes to a joint Cloud Operations Team for the daily operations of our managed clouds. Furthermore, the companies focus on joining innovations in new services and supported technologies such as containerization. Even more so, when we think their expertise will be valuable, we will extend the Fairbanks International Group with relevant companies.
Besides that, as a group we can make a bigger positive impact together! We are aware that the infrastructures we support consume a lot of energy and rare materials that can have a negative effect on the state of our planet. We believe that we as a group, in cooperation with our customers and open source communities we can find ways to improve the impact through open source innovations. In 2022 we noticed that our management as well as most of our employees and customers showed a lot of motivation to leave the planet better than we found it. In that light we gained some interesting ideas about how we can maximize our positive impact and consequently are developing our strategy around that. An example of this is the talk of the current and the former CTO of 42on (Wout van Heeswijk and Wido den Hollander) for the Cephalocon about the possible benefits of extending the hardware lifespan in your Ceph Cluster by designing it failure proof. In addition, in my communication with several companies in Europe and open source organizations, I see that we are not alone in this subject. That said, we just started this journey, but we are determined to be more vigilant and powerful to really make a difference.
How does the Fairbanks International Group affect me as a future employee?
I think most importantly is that for our employees our joint services, technologies and customers can provide you with more variety in career opportunities. With multiple areas and combinations of expertise’s to explore and opportunity to dive deeper into any area of expertise if you want. The focus of all our services in our companies is always to find a way to support as many customers as possible with the specialized expertise that we have. By standardizing our services as much as possible within our companies we can make use of any niche expertise easily, even if it’s for one specific customer needed just once.
Why this helps our customers, is because they can’t maintain all expertise’s that are needed to sustainably run such open source cloud solutions by themselves.
In turn, it helps our employees, because you can always find a challenge within the expertise you already have acquired or you want to develop. For example, as a Linux or Storage engineer without expertise on Ceph, you can start out with getting familiar with providing the basic support for Ceph and train and work your way into more responsibility and expertise. Furthermore, as an experienced Ceph engineer you can leave the day-to-day Ceph tasks to your colleagues and specialize in for example in S3 or RBD. But you could also evolve your expertise by combining Ceph with OpenStack or Kubernetes. Think of Rook in that matter.
As an employee, how do I notice being part of Fairbanks International Group?
Although 42on is a separate and strong brand in Ceph markets, all employment contracts including those of 42on, are with Fairbanks. This means, you will be part of a team of around 10 Ceph specialists but enjoy the company of around 30 colleagues in total. What this entails is that you will work together sometimes on development or on a customer case and see each other a few times a month at our office in Baarn and quarterly and yearly company events.
