How Flexibility and Choice Powers Customer Success, a SUSE on-demand webinar, explores why Rancher Prime excels in the container management landscape with best-in-class features, unparalleled flexibility and seamless integration across multi-cloud, edge and on-premises environments. Kenney Sharpton, vice president of engineering at Armedia, shares his company’s experience with Rancher Prime and his thoughts about SUSE being recognized as a Leader in 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Container Management.
At-a-Glance
With Rancher Prime, Armedia has reduced deployment time from 7-14 days to just 12 minutes and increased its software release frequency from 1-2 releases per year to 1-2 releases per day.
The following is a transcript of Sharpton’s conversation with Eric Wahlquist, senior content marketing manager at SUSE, and Peter Smails, general manager, ECM at SUSE. Watch the webinar here.
"We used to do one or two releases a year of our product or our software and now we're, we're able to hit one or two a month and, you know, the goal for one or two a day or even more."
Transcript
Eric Wahlquist: We're very excited to have Kenney Sharpton here. He's from Armedia, one of our valued customers. Kenney, thank you so much for joining us today.
Kenney Sharpton: Thank you very much for having me.
Wahlquist: So I'd love to hear your story. Why was Rancher Prime the right choice for you? And what benefits have you seen from leveraging this platform?
Sharpton: About a year ago, we started a migration from a monolithic application into Kubernetes. In that process, we have a lot of containers that we've developed and we work in various clouds. When you start that containerization and deployment with Kubernetes, you look at “How do we manage this?” And so when you Google, “How do you manage Kubernetes,” Rancher is right there at the top. And I've used it in previous lives as well. So it was definitely an easy case for me to grab that and start using it. And it's proven itself time and again as we've been rolling through it with being able to manage the different environments that we have to work with for our different customers. We manage Kubernetes clusters inside Azure, AWS, on premise. As part of that Rancher ecosystem for our on premise workloads, we started to adopt Harvester and leverage Longhorn. And we've been having some really good luck with it. It's been very nice for us. It's stable, just been awesome, and it allows us to really tune up our velocity on how we get things done.
Peter Smails: Sounds like you've had some pretty specific business outcomes. Been able to achieve some things, change the day-to-day operations of the shop. Can you talk a little bit more about those outcomes?
Sharpton: Absolutely. They've been pretty significant. So from the deployment of the platform infrastructure, the platform engineering side, it would take us seven to 14 days to get an environment ready to go for an application. I think our last clock in was about twelve minutes to get that done with Rancher. Leveraging Fleet on top of Rancher and getting into that GitOps ethos, it's definitely made a big difference for us. That's one big one, obviously very significant. And it's reliability. We can build that in twelve minutes and it's more stable and reliable than all the rest of it ever has been because it's not click ops anymore. The other side of that is from the application side to support our customers. We work with the Washington DC office and we were able to scale one of their applications and we can run over 1,000 users. Using Rancher to help auto scale those clusters on the back end has been very helpful. The big one is we used to do one or two releases a year of our product, of our software. Now we're able to hit one or two a month. The goal [is] for one or two a day or even more. When I first came on board and said that it was like, deer in the headlights and “that's not going to happen.” Whereas now, we're here and we got here easily and we're going to get to that. I don't know when, but we're going to definitely be able to release one or two a day. Absolutely, Rancher and that whole platform we use from the SUSE line for Rancher, has just really helped enable that greatly.
Smails: Awesome. I love it. Because not everyone is always familiar with the fact Prime is an entire portfolio of capabilities. I love how you touched on Fleet as well. And there's a lot in Prime that I think people can be excited about. And I just love the comment about redefining what's possible. You just keep moving the goalpost. Appreciate you sharing that insight.
Wahlquist: We love to hear how our customers leverage our platforms to make the impossible possible. As we hear about this recognition from Gartner as a leader in the Magic Quadrant, what does that mean for you as a customer, Kenney?
Sharpton: A lot of our customers are government organizations or large enterprises for our case management product. When we start selling these things to our customers and we're trying to talk about moving all their content management platforms onto our product, that's a very large moving part. When we come to the table, with the products that we're riding on, recognized by Gartner, that comes with a lot of power and a lot of recognition. Gartner is a leader in the space of trying to determine who does what, where and how well they do it, especially in the enterprise. So SUSE getting this recognition for container management is just amazing for us because it really helps validate what we're doing to our customers. It's carrying on down through the pipeline, all the way down, that we're using reliable products. As Peter mentioned, BMW is using these things. So it helps give that recognition and the validation that we're looking for as well.