Introducing Schneider Electric
Believing access to energy and digital services is a basic human right, Schneider Electric creates integrated solutions for homes, commercial and municipal buildings, data centers and industrial infrastructure. By putting efficiency and sustainability at the heart of the portfolio, the company helps consumers and businesses to make the most of their energy resources.
Schneider Electric turns asset data into action. Real-time data on infrastructure performance helps reduce maintenance costs and maximize system uptime. Head of global infrastructure strategy, Anthony Andrades guided the business unit through a period of significant transformation. Andrades’ remit was to build the strategic vision and analyze everything the business does from an innovation point of view. This encompassed how the estate of data centers operates, the diverse ways applications are built and run, asset obsolescence, configuration and cost. He is also responsible for managing the cultural shift intrinsically associated with large-scale digital transformation.
At-a-Glance
One of Schneider Electric’s operating imperatives is to turn asset data into action, with a view to reducing maintenance costs and maximizing system uptime. The quest to achieve this precipitated a period of significant transformation. Once the team homed in on Kubernetes as the ideal enabling technology for this transformation, Rancher Prime was selected as Schneider Electric’s partner on access control, identity management and container management.
The journey to containers
Schneider Electric had already entered the cloud ecosystem in 2013, with a couple of business-driven projects running quietly in AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft Azure. Once the success of these projects became known, Andrades was drafted to build on this and create an enterprise-grade cloud strategy. By 2016, the company expanded its global AWS footprint, and its mission to migrate its infrastructure to the cloud had begun.
The team became aware of Kubernetes a year earlier in 2015 and quickly identified it as a cost-effective way to create the microservices-based, service-oriented architecture that large digital enterprises, like Google and Facebook, had pioneered. There were some pockets of excellence where Kubernetes was already running, but the picture wasn’t consistent. Access control was a major issue. Several customer development teams needed access to clusters, but this was uncontrolled which, in some cases, resulted in the suspension of Docker usage, until a rules-based PaaS (Platform as a Service) was put in place.
The team was already familiar with Rancher Prime and, in early 2018, Andrades carried out a successful POC with Rancher Labs (now Rancher by SUSE) and Rancher’s security partner Aqua. Soon after, the team started using Rancher Prime on top of Kubernetes, to provide the access control, identity management and globalized performance metrics that don’t ship with Kubernetes. They also integrated Rancher Prime with AWS services to enhance scalability and reliability.
Rancher Prime performed so well it was chosen to underpin Schneider’s container-management platform. In June 2019, the platform was deployed to run 20 nodes, and the painstaking process of application modernization began.
“This is a wholesale transformation in the way we support the business. Our ultimate aims are to make our technology investments work harder for us and modernize the systems that have been supporting manufacturing processes for 20 years. Kubernetes and Rancher Prime are helping us get there.”
What were the problems Schneider Electric wanted to solve?
Legacy transformation
Like many established businesses, Schneider had been through 25 years of technical evolution. Over time, the company has built and deployed thousands of separate services and applications, running on Windows Server or Red Hat, that had to be re-engineered or rebuilt before migration to the cloud.
Andrades’ primary objective was to complete the transformation and migration of all applications within five years. This was no mean feat when you consider the volume of applications involved, and the fact that different applications required different modernization approaches. In late 2019, the team started the painstaking process of analyzing the entire estate of applications, categorizing each one according to the most appropriate and efficient way to modernize and migrate.
For some key applications, this was done in stages; the application was ‘lifted and shifted’ to the cloud, optimized and made available as a service. Teams then redesigned the application later. Others were completely decommissioned and rebuilt as microservices. Static web servers, for example, were converted into Amazon S3 buckets using Amazon S3’s static website hosting feature, providing scalable and cost-effective web hosting. Where two-tier applications were concerned (web front end running a UI with a relational database in the backend) the UI was run on a container and the database ported to Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service), offering automated backups, software patching and scalability.
In Kubernetes, development teams could deploy multiple clusters, each configured to specific application requirements. In Rancher Prime, the infrastructure team could run each of these bespoke environments side by side, via one intuitive platform. Crucially, when used with other solutions, such as Aqua, Rancher Prime became a secure and compliant environment for teams — both internal and external — to collaborate. With access control easily configurable in Rancher Prime, the infrastructure team can allow unbridled access to the platform. This approach significantly boosts team innovation.
When the project was in its infancy, Andrades could already see benefits daily. He had a mammoth task ahead: if he were to reach his five-year migration goal, he needed to automate a host of basic processes such as role-based access control (RBAC), namespace-as-a-service, authentication, application catalog, etc. Rancher Prime takes care of these functions, dramatically reducing the deployment workload. According to Andrades, developers don’t need to worry about security or operational processes. They can bring their own pipelines and repositories with them and run their workloads seamlessly while Rancher Prime and Aqua guardrail the security controls.
Andrades and the team appreciate the fact they don’t need to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Leveraging AWS services provides them with high availability and scalability out of the box. If there’s a problem, they receive a notification through Rancher Prime. If they want to quickly check the status of the clusters, they can check the dashboard to check everything is ‘green.’ They no longer have to keep checking performance, workload status, resource usage – Rancher Prime removes the manual burden. This, Andrades believes, has freed teams to think more creatively.
After successfully migrating four key applications and managing them in clusters via the Rancher Prime platform, the team extended its use of the Rancher Prime platform by doubling the number of nodes running in the cloud on AWS.
A cultural transformation
As well as leading the technical transformation, Andrades was responsible for managing the cultural shift that a move to containers and the cloud naturally requires.
For some, who had been working in technology for the last couple of decades, a shift to a cloud native existence was a big one. Long-ingrained development methodologies baked into the fabric of the infrastructure were as hard to modernize as the technology itself — particularly when it might appear that the technology itself was replacing major parts of the job.
Andrades’ focus, therefore, was to excite and galvanize the company around the opportunity every developer had to build new, disruptive skills. The range of experience spanned experts through to complete novices, and so his mission was to globalize the existing pockets of excellence by bringing the company together to hear their stories and take a closer look at how they were succeeding with Kubernetes. By sharing detailed technical expertise and best practice, along with a sense of long-term value, Andrades and his team effectively carried the business along the journey with them.
What's next?
Schneider Electric’s relationship with SUSE looks set to continue to grow in the coming months and years. The team recently renewed its support contract with SUSE and has doubled its usage of the Rancher Prime platform — expanding to 40 nodes hosted on AWS infrastructure. This deepening of the relationship illustrates the confidence Andrades and his team have in the platform, the support they receive from Rancher Prime and the long-term value the alliance will bring to Schneider Electric, its customers and the wider European energy sector.