Stephen F. Austin State University chose SUSE Rancher for its Kubernetes environment, with Travis Killen highlighting the journey’s challenges, CI/CD automation, and the importance of support at SUSECON 2023.
At-a-Glance
Stephen F. Austin State University, located in Texas Forest Country, is a comprehensive regional institution offering 83 undergraduate majors and 120 areas of study across six academic colleges. At SUSECON 2023, the university’s Assistant Director of Enterprise Systems, Travis Killen, took the stage to share the institution’s journey in building an enterprise-ready Kubernetes environment with SUSE Rancher. In his presentation, Killen detailed the selection process, onboarding, implementation, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), and the challenges and lessons learned along the way.
Le défi
“I would recommend that you leverage your support contract. We have had a lot of luck using support and getting some hands-on time with technicians and knowledgeable people. They respond in a timely manner and they are always very helpful.”
Solution SUSE
Implementing Rancher and Kubernetes in Higher Education
Killen and his team evaluated three solutions to solve the challenge of building an enterprise-ready Kubernetes environment: VMware Tanzu, SUSE Rancher and Red Hat Openshift. Despite existing relationships with VMWare and Red Hat, they found Rancher to be the best choice due to its seamless implementation, intuitive interface, lack of vendor lock-in and compatibility with their existing VMware and Red Hat environments.
Onboarding began with SUSE Rancher 24-hour quickstart, a project management engagement. The initial supportability review ensured Killen and his team were starting with an environment that was ready to be supported. It covered key configurations such as the image registry, load balancer installation, and backup architecture.
“They went through our engagement planning so that the SUSE team would know our expectations and we would have a good understanding of the statement of work for the SUSE team,” explained Killen.
The importance of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) in the Kubernetes journey
Through their journey, Killen and his team discovered the pivotal role CI/CD plays in the Kubernetes journey. Killen highlights the importance of automation and foresight in CI/CD processes and the necessity of understanding its complexities:
“CI/CD really streamlines the nature of the operations and it requires a lot of forethought and foresight. There's a lot of nuanced complexities and options available for CI/CD.” The process involved creating multiple code branches, storing manifests in their GitLab folder and using pipelines to build the container image when the code is committed.
Killen continues with a real-time demonstration of the CI/CD workflow, showing how changes in the test environment are committed, detected and redeployed using Fleet, a native continuous delivery product of Rancher.
Overcoming challenges and lessons learned
Concluding his presentation, Killen acknowledges the challenges his team faced throughout their journey, including steep learning curves and complex deployment processes.
Killen admitted, "The first one I'd like to mention is the learning curves. You have to have a lot of knowledge about a lot of different systems, including Linux, networking, infrastructure, storage configurations, Kubernetes and Docker." According to Killen, it’s critical to have dedicated technicians for a complex project like this.
Furthermore, Killen highlights the benefits of leveraging support: “I would recommend that you leverage your support contract. We have had a lot of luck using support and getting some hands-on time with technicians and knowledgeable people. They respond in a timely manner and they are always very helpful.”
Despite the obstacles, Killen urged his audience to persist, stating, "Push forward, don't get scared off. It is complex and there's a lot of challenges along the way, but if you push forward and try to jump through the hoops and get over the bumps one at a time, I think you'll find that the automation that you can achieve is just amazing."