Sfil is a subsidiary of Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, the French sovereign wealth fund that invests public money for the benefit of the state. As a public development bank, and the ninth largest French bank by balance sheet, Sfil is a leader in financing the French economy. Over the past 10 years, the organization has provided 44 billion euros in loans to primarily finance vital public assets such as schools, hospitals, gymnasiums and wind turbines. As the leading liquidity provider for export credit guaranteed by the French state, Sfil also helps French companies reduce the risk of doing business globally.
At-a-Glance
As a leading financer of the French economy, it’s vital for Sfil to be ready for whatever challenges the future brings, and whatever technologies the business may want to adopt. By working with Metanext and selecting Rancher Prime as its Kubernetes management platform, Sfil has created a robust and secure environment for swift, flexible application deployment. With its new containerization capability, Sfil is in pole position to respond rapidly to demanding business needs
The journey to containers
Similar to many organizations, Sfil is expanding its use of Agile development practices and embracing DevOps. In both cases, it aims to increase IT efficiency and enable the company to respond rapidly to new challenges and opportunities. To make the most of these new approaches to software (microservices), Sfil aims to ensure that its infrastructure is equally flexible and responsive.
Concurrently, Sfil observes a growing trend among independent software vendors adopting containers as the primary delivery format for their products.
“Given both our internal evolution and the direction the market is taking, we wanted to be prepared for containerization,” says Eric Bonami, IT director at Sfil. “Because we lacked a clear understanding of potential use cases, we favored an open source approach that would enable us to keep our options open.”
“Our Rancher Prime containerization solution gave us the agility and speed we needed to hit the deadline and go live without any interruption to the intranet service. We could not have achieved this high-profile deployment as quickly and as easily without the help of Rancher Prime. The solution enables shorter, clearer and more efficient deployment workflows.”
Why Rancher Prime?
Without existing internal knowledge in containers, Sfil asked Metanext for help in implementing a reliable Kubernetes strategy. With more than 180 employees serving the whole of France, Metanext provides consulting, services and solutions for next-generation IT infrastructure. As a first step, Metanext led a series of workshops for Sfil to evaluate potential solutions from vendors including SUSE, Red Hat and VMware.
“Rancher Prime was a natural choice because it’s 100% open source,” says Bonami. “We try as far as possible to maintain our independence and choice of vendors. We later discovered that Rancher Prime is also used by other companies in our group, which is a further plus point.”
Sfil’s Rancher Prime subscription provides comprehensive enterprise support for Kubernetes container environments, together with access to professional services and a rich knowledge base. The solution offers an extensive catalog of integrations and UI extensions for Kubernetes. Sfil opted for an on-premises deployment of Rancher Prime atop Linux servers. The choice of an “air gap” installation based on a security-first approach and trusted private container registry help minimize risk.
Leveraging its extensive expertise in Kubernetes and Rancher technologies, Metanext streamlined deployment, addressed security and backup, and transferred the necessary skills to Sfil’s team.
“Metanext delivered a comprehensive solution that included important aspects such as container security,” says Bonami. “We invested time in the proof-of-concept [PoC] exercise. We wanted to identify really appropriate use cases for which containerization would provide the most value. Rancher Prime has turned out to be the right solution.”
The impact
Streamlined intranet migration
As the PoC neared completion, Sfil decided to migrate its corporate intranet from SharePoint to WordPress, creating an opportunity to implement a production deployment on Kubernetes with the new solution. With go-live scheduled to mark the bank’s ten-year anniversary, the stakes were high.
“We were asked to migrate our intranet with just one month’s notice,” recalls Florent Bague, Manager for Unix, Storage and Tools at Sfil. “Our Rancher Prime containerization solution gave us the agility and speed we needed to hit the deadline and go live without any interruption to the intranet service. We could not have achieved this high-profile deployment as quickly and as easily without the help of Rancher Prime. The solution enables shorter, clearer and more efficient deployment workflows.”
Accelerated Kubernetes adoption
For Sfil, one of the key benefits of using Rancher Prime has been its ability to accelerate the adoption of Kubernetes. Bague says: “Rancher Prime provided us with visibility and usability from the beginning. Instead of struggling with the command line in a vanilla Kubernetes deployment, we could immediately visualize our environment and manage it confidently.”
Putting the accent on security
As a bank, Sfil must pay close attention to the security of its services. In adopting containerization, it wanted a cloud workload protection platform that could deliver a complete view of the entire environment, from CI/CD pipelines all the way through to the Kubernetes platform itself, with the ability to launch vulnerability scans on demand. Metanext helped Sfil to select a container security platform and integrate it with the Rancher Prime environment.
Optimized data center capacity
As an organization operating its own hardware, Sfil values how Rancher Prime makes it easier to move containers between compute resources as demands change. Utilizing multiple small containers, Sfil can optimize hardware usage more effectively than with monolithic systems, which will reduce the organization’s long-term cost of acquisition and ownership for hardware.
“It’s like comparing sand with rocks,” says Bague. “Containerisation allows you to fill a vessel with sand, optimizing the use of resources and the available space.”
Enterprise support
From the study phase onwards, Sfil has taken advantage of the enterprise support within its Rancher Prime subscription to manage its deployment and iron out issues. “As early as the prototype, we called on support from Rancher because we encountered some unprecedented issues around Windows integration and networking,” says Bague. “The Rancher team stepped up to the mark and knew how to work through these challenges with us.” This support from Rancher has dovetailed with the ongoing assistance from Metanext.
What’s next for Sfil?
Now that Sfil has gained a Kubernetes infrastructure under Rancher Prime’s management, the organization is investigating additional use cases for the solution stack. Instead of adopting a full replatforming strategy, Sfil is continuing its rollout with suitable use cases and applications.
“We can now present Kubernetes as a technology for our business, with existing microservices development projects set to be hosted on this platform,” says Bonami. “As we move ahead with new containerization projects, we are confident that Rancher Prime will make it easy for us to manage the performance, security and resilience of our container landscape.”