Glimpse reduces time-to-launch with agile DevOps strategy

“SUSE Rancher offers painless Kubernetes upgrades, native Kubernetes experience and is also really easy to use.” Predrag Aleksić, Team Lead – System Engineer, Glimpse.

Unique in the streaming industry and gearing up for its full commercial launch, Glimpse enables content creators to gate content, modify pricing on-the-go and accept payments and tips directly from fans. Users of the platform include gamers, esports creators, visual artists, instructors and content consumers.

Glimpse utilizes DevOps methodologies to increase development velocity and enable frequent, seamless updates for improved user experiences. From the outset Glimpse grasped microservices and built a custom environment to enhance efficiency. This environment included Kubernetes clusters, meaning that it was highly customizable, highly available and resilient, but it also brought with it complexity and management challenges. So much so, in fact, the team struggled to recruit new hires capable of managing the environment.

Glimpse turned to its trusted partner, phoenixNAP, for a solution and in so doing learned about SUSE Rancher. The phoenixNAP team helped Glimpse arrange a proof of concept (POC) with SUSE Rancher in late 2021. Glimpse soon discovered that SUSE Rancher simplifies Kubernetes deployments and management, taking care of provisioning, monitoring and access control out-of-the-box. SUSE Rancher became an easy choice for the Glimpse team, delivering painless Kubernetes upgrades, native Kubernetes experience and ease of use.

Speed, simplicity and innovation

The POC demonstrated SUSE Rancher’s ability to not only orchestrate Glimpse’s Kubernetes clusters effectively, but to also simplify management of the complete stack through a single pane of glass.

After reading the documentation from SUSE Rancher and taking a week to code the stack, making a cluster fully operational took only 50 minutes. This is 10 minutes faster than Glimpse’s homegrown cluster, a 20% faster cluster deployment time that makes all the difference.

Coupled with SUSE Rancher’s increased speeds also comes simple multicluster operations and automation of updates, freeing the team to work on different high value tasks that drive the business forward. New environments can now be launched at the click of a button. Increased simplicity also makes recruiting the right level of talent much easier, with a much-widened hiring pool.

With a successful POC behind them, Glimpse plans to migrate its workload, 500 containers unscaled, to SUSE Rancher as a final step before launch later in 2022.

The Glimpse team describes SUSE Rancher as the glue holding everything together, ensuring that complex Kubernetes infrastructure is able to scale without additional overhead — including gaming servers, streaming servers, user management systems, and billing transactions with third parties.

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