One of the world’s leading energy technology companies, which counts almost 100,000 employees, serves thousands of customers across the globe. A process solution unit within this company provides innovative, customized automation and digitization solutions for customers.
Not only do these solutions, which are rooted in open source technologies, help to optimize plant operations and decrease maintenance frequency, but they’re also helping some affiliate organizations move toward remote operations and fully autonomous plants.
Ultimately, these customized solutions (combined with continuous innovation in technology, business models and partnerships) help industrial companies decarbonize operations at all levels. In light of global warming, this has never been more important; the industrial sector accounted for 37% of all energy used worldwide in 2022 (International Energy Agency), along with a major share of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Kubernetes, Rancher Prime and K3s play a central role in these solutions, making it possible for the energy company to develop smarter and more efficient ways of operating a reliable energy supply in sustainable ways.
At-a-Glance
The energy industry is changing rapidly. Organizations are looking to shift away from fossil-based energy production and consumption for a more sustainable and viable future, a move fueled by the use of modern technology. A leading energy company, already well on its journey to creating a more sustainable and efficient future, is embracing Rancher Prime and Kubernetes to help create the autonomous plant of the future. Not only is its use of open source leading to environmental benefits by liberating legacy processes to the cloud, but open source is also helping it to scale and grow to manage more customers than ever before.
The journey to Kubernetes and Rancher Prime
The energy company has always been a lover of open source technologies, according to the head of the digitally embedded solutions team. Open source has enabled the company to embrace a microservices architecture for supporting its need to scale and develop at pace.
In 2018, the company began developing (with open source technologies) a digitalization solution for creating a digital twin of a customer’s plant. This digital plant copy helps optimize operations and systems, while increasing maintenance intervals.
This open approach was also at the forefront when creating a common toolbox in 2020. The common toolbox would allow the company to serve different markets running consistent, common methodologies.
To develop this common toolbox, the company needed a system that could both support myriad customer installations at scale and help it to become more cloud native and microservices-based. Encouraged by cutting-edge reports in container technology, it adopted a community version of Kubernetes and used simple Docker Compose for orchestration.
Before long, however, the company realized it needed help maintaining its complex infrastructure due to a lack of in-house Kubernetes experts. After evaluating a number of different Kubernetes management companies, the company chose Rancher Prime because of its cost, commitment to open source and strong enterprise support (a key feature for an organization with little experience in the Kubernetes domain).
“We decided to go with Rancher Prime because it is open source in nature and because of its strong enterprise support,” says the enterprise architect and creator of the common toolbox. “This was actually a game-changer, and why we went with Rancher Prime.”
In June 2020, the team began an eight-month POC with Rancher Prime, which ended in a quick decision that the orchestration platform was right for them. “We often have to put in a lot of effort into making a decision, but in this case, we easily agreed as a team,” the head of digitally embedded solutions says.
From a technological point of view, the enterprise architect adds that Rancher Prime’s out-of-the-box edge management support was also a major selling point. This automation feature enabled the organization to set up a Kubernetes environment without any engineering effort.
To liberate its customers’ legacy processes to a more efficient cloud-based model, the energy company is also using K3s at the edge, alongside the Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE). K3s is a highly available, certified Kubernetes distribution designed for production workloads in unattended, resource-constrained, remote locations or inside IoT appliances. The combination also delivers more transparency and visibility across an entire pipeline estate.
“Typically, for big oil and gas players, everything happens in their own corporate network or in the data center. So, we create a cluster where the digital solutions run. We then take the Rancher Prime service on-premises, where it can manage solutions deployed in the customer data center,” the enterprise architect says. “Oil and gas customers have a lot of sources of data, yet there are political barriers between departments. This is what we address with our digital solution.”
“Because Rancher Prime is open source and cloud agnostic, we can implement our common toolbox solution in any customer environment, even if it’s on-premises.”
What are they achieving with Rancher Prime and K3s?
Creating the autonomous plant of the future
The energy company’s digital platform, which uses Kubernetes from core to edge, is fueling a revolution in the industrial processes industry. In the gas and oil industry, for example, the company’s customized solution is not only helping customers to optimize operations and reduce maintenance, but it’s also equipping organizations with a level of transparency that couldn’t previously be achieved due to on-premises system limitations and political barriers. Oil and gas giants can now monitor thousands of miles of pipeline like never before, which is, in turn, reducing energy costs and dangerous emissions through streamlining and automation.
Scale at pace
Using Kubernetes and Rancher Prime within its own organization, the company keeps pace with a rapidly evolving industry. Thanks to Kubernetes, the organization now has the capacity it needs to scale and better manage its infrastructure. It has also helped the company, which has long seen the benefits of a microservices-based architecture, to reuse ready-made components for delivering competitive software products and services to customers faster. Ultimately, the open source nature of Kubernetes, coupled with on-hand support from Rancher Prime, enables the company to move toward continuous delivery.
Liberating legacy processes
Not only has its use of Kubernetes enabled it to transform its own business workflow, but it has also enabled the company’s industrial customers to liberate their own legacy processes to the cloud. While many of these companies have strict requirements, the common toolbox, based on Kubernetes, enables the organization’s digital platform to be easily scaled and reworked across different verticals. By using Kubernetes and K3s, the company is able to use standard components across oil, gas, marine and fiber, while allowing it to easily customize settings related to privacy and security.
Environmental benefits
One of the most important factors for the company in its journey to Kubernetes was sustainability, as the organization is on a mission to help customers cut down carbon emissions and deliver more sustainable energy. By helping industrial giants move toward an automated future, the company’s solutions are helping to streamline operations, reduce maintenance frequency, and, ultimately, reduce dangerous CO2 emissions through remote operations.
“This is very much associated with optimizing operations, reducing energy consumption and predicting downtimes that might also lead to higher energy expenses,” says the head of digitally embedded solutions. “We are also active in the sustainable domain, supporting plants that are utilizing hydrolysis, for example. This is a new business field that we are active in where it’s about energy, saving energy and monitoring the systems.”
What’s next?
The energy company is scaling rapidly. Its digitization solution has been embraced in the fiber industry, where it was initially rolled out to one paper plant, and it is now rolling out to more than 30 plants. The organization hopes to bring its customized solutions to more customers within that sector.
The company’s open source approach is also enabling it to promote change throughout its own organization. The company says it’s planning to use open source to boost bottom-up collaboration across organizational boundaries and to further accelerate the sourcing and handling of software throughout the company. It’s also contributing to open source projects to ensure these meet its future needs.