CRB drives digital excellence into the Swiss construction industry with SUSE Rancher

“SUSE Rancher helps us accelerate the evolution of our digital offering. We can quickly and easily allocate more or fewer resources to our applications as needed and optimize infrastructure usage.” Tanja Knuser, Head of Development and Technology, Executive Board Member, CRB. 

The Swiss Research Center for Rationalization in Building and Civil Engineering (CRB) is a center of excellence for standards in the construction industry and is focused on the development of innovative working tools that contribute to better productivity.

It helps construction professionals calculate costs uniformly, to describe and invoice services clearly and comprehensibly, and to optimize processes. Incredibly, CRB maintains and administers over 1.3 million standard positions, as well as a database with over 45,000 construction terms in the Swiss national languages of German, French and Italian.

With a primary goal to accelerate the delivery of new and updated digital services and, as a result, better serve the 5,000 member companies that depend on it, CRB needed to transform its IT infrastructure. Its existing monolithic architecture struggled to keep pace with demand and the team increasingly found itself reliant on containerized applications.

Kubernetes orchestration was the natural next step and so, in partnership with IT service provider VSHN, CRB chose SUSE Rancher as its management platform for its cost effectiveness and the ease with which it could run and automate Kubernetes infrastructure management.

Benefits of an agile infrastructure

The benefits for CRB of an agile infrastructure were wide ranging and instantaneous.

SUSE Rancher’s high level of automation means CRB’s developers can deploy innovative applications much faster – provisioning times have been reduced by 80%. This frees resources that can be invested in new developments. The environment can be updated more frequently, and security patches applied automatically to all clusters in the environment, reducing vulnerability to cyber risks.

With SUSE Rancher, CRB has standardized its internal processes for developing and deploying digital applications. The solution makes it possible to apply consistent user access and security policies across all clusters. The standardization and clearly defined interfaces also make it easier to switch employees between different projects and integrate external service providers. For this reason, onboarding new employees has become much easier and new projects can be initiated faster.

With SUSE Rancher, administrators can monitor any cluster at any site, update Kubernetes versions, perform backups, and restore compromised clusters from a single console. CRB no longer has to worry about infrastructure downtime or constantly check the performance and utilization of the individual systems, freeing them to focus entirely on developing and delivering innovative services.

Click here to find out more about how SUSE Rancher is helping CRB to drive digital best practice into the Swiss construction industry.