Interconnect is a proven data center and cloud provider in the Netherlands. With a 30-year track record of success, Interconnect hosts cloud services in its own advanced data centers in Den Bosch and Eindhoven. Their geographical separation – and Den Bosch’s status as a brand-new site – enhances the resilience of Interconnect’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions.
At-a-Glance
By helping a client migrate from Red Hat OpenShift to Rancher Prime, Interconnect increased the stability and scalability of the Kubernetes landscape supporting its client’s student information system. Rancher Prime has significantly reduced downtime associated with software updates and can automatically adjust system resources up or down in response to changing demand patterns.
The journey to Rancher Prime
One of Interconnect’s clients – an educational software provider - had built a Kubernetes landscape based on Red Hat OpenShift to support a cloud-based, software-as-as-service student information system (SIS). To support its growth and expansion into new markets such as intermediate vocational education, the educational software provider needed a more robust and scalable infrastructure for this solution.
The company encountered occasional stability problems when it came to updating the Kubernetes environment. During security updates and version upgrades, the existing platform occasionally suffered from unexpected downtime and disruption. In addition, the platform used by the company did not allow applications to scale vertically through the automatic assignment of new clusters.
The operations team leader at the educational software provider says, “Upgrading our Kubernetes environment caused problems. We wanted to be able to upgrade non-disruptively.”
“Rancher Prime was a perfect fit with our business model, giving us a truly open-source solution backed by a vendor with a strong presence in Europe.”
Why Rancher Prime and Interconnect?
The educational software provider’s focus is on developing its applications for the education sector; the company wanted to find a partner capable of setting up and managing the new Kubernetes environment on its behalf.
The company asked Interconnect, its long-term hosting partner and the provider of the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environment on which Kubernetes was running, to find a solution.
“We already use a lot of Interconnect services, so we trusted them to find the right Kubernetes platform for our needs,” says the operations team leader.
The company’s contract and supplier manager adds, “Choosing Interconnect as our partner for Kubernetes also represented a rationalization of our supplier list, giving us a single point of contact for support and billing, which is ultimately more productive and cost-effective.”
Based on Interconnect’s recommendation, the educational software provider decided to migrate from Red Hat OpenShift to Rancher Prime.
Jeroen Mulder, key account manager at Interconnect, says: “Rancher Prime was a perfect fit with our business model, giving us a truly open-source solution backed by a vendor with a strong presence in Europe. Rancher Prime provides excellent stability and automation tools that make it easy to manage Kubernetes, so we were able to get up to speed relatively quickly.”
The educational software provider also worked with another third party to perform a gap analysis of its existing containerized software. This firm then worked with Interconnect to modify the software to take advantage of the cluster autoscaler capabilities of Rancher Prime.
The impact of Rancher Prime
Fast, non-disruptive migration
The migration to Rancher ran smoothly for the educational software provider, helped by the intuitive tools in Rancher Prime. Interconnect was able to hit the ground running, quickly gaining the skills required to complete the migration and get its client’s containers working on the new platform. Since the initial migration, Interconnect has moved its client to a second version of its Kubernetes offering based on Rancher Prime, including Rancher Longhorn cloud-native distributed block storage.
“The migration to Rancher Prime was trouble-free and non-disruptive from the perspective of our customers,” says the operations team leader at the educational software provider. “Working with Interconnect enabled us to resolve these issues that previously held back our adoption of Kubernetes.”
Stability and confidence in updates
Kubernetes technology is always developing, and the educational software provider wants to take advantage of enhancements and new features as soon as they are available. With Rancher Prime, the company enjoys updates and upgrades with significantly less impact and downtime on customer services.
“Previously, we experienced downtime and uncertainty around the Kubernetes infrastructure,” says the operations team leader. “With Rancher Prime and support from Interconnect, technical maintenance runs much more smoothly and we can upgrade with hardly any downtime.”
Scalable and flexible services
With its SIS now running largely in Kubernetes containers, the educational software provider benefits from better connectivity with other services and greater scalability. The cluster autoscaler functionality in Rancher Prime automatically adjusts the size of Kubernetes clusters if there are insufficient resources to run the workload or conversely if nodes in the cluster have been underutilized for an extended period. This means that the SIS can provide exceptional performance in response without costly over-provisioning of infrastructure.
“Thanks to the automation and scalability of Rancher Prime, we are confident that our SIS will be able to meet the changing needs of our customers,” says the operations team leader.
What’s next for the client?
As the educational software provider continues to win new customers for its SIS both in the Netherlands and further afield, the company will continue to develop on the solid foundations of Rancher Prime. With its application built on Rancher’s self-healing, auto-scaling platform, it can focus on developing new functionality to delight its customers rather than on low-level infrastructure maintenance. The company will also continue to work with Interconnect to enhance the platform and to deliver better levels of service to its customers.