Inacta: Scaling Up with Kubernetes

“Provisioning a new environment now takes a matter of minutes, whereas before it would take a few hours at least. All the time we used to spend on manual configuration and security, we can now spend more usefully.” Adrian Lüthi, DevOps Specialist, Inacta AG.

In the wake of the global pandemic, companies are hastening digital transformation strategies in a bid to build greater resilience. As a leading Swiss AI and Blockchain technology provider, Inacta AG is primed to help financial organizations prosper and is poised for rapid growth. To help the company achieve sustainable expansion, it is working with SUSE Rancher to drive scale, agility and innovation.

As Inacta rapidly outgrew its legacy solution, Docker Compose, the objectives it set for its successor included the ability to scale swiftly, safely and cost effectively, given its rapid growth rate. It also targeted reliability, as Inacta’s customer base includes many top banking and insurance institutions.

Kubernetes became the obvious choice for two main reasons. Not only was it (and remains) the most commonly used open source container orchestration platform, it also allows teams to spin up and tear down new clusters at a moment’s notice, without the need for additional resources.

Inacta briefly considered Red Hat OpenShift, but realized that the monocluster architecture makes scaling (and multi-cluster management) difficult and would also cause costs to soar. In April 2019, the DevOps team concluded SUSE Rancher was the right choice. Not only did the platform prove far more cost-effective than the alternatives, but SUSE Rancher’s open source ethos matched Inacta’s similarly open approach.

The journey to containers: operational efficiency, reduced costs and stress-free development

Since Inacta started using SUSE Rancher the company has reaped multiple benefits. The team has seen costs reduce by more than a third; its developers now have time to put innovation first; and the company is finally able to scale with growing demand.

SUSE Rancher saves development teams’ time by removing the need to reinvent the wheel with every new deployment. It eliminates, for example, the requirement to manually manage basic processes. Clusters can be configured, deployed, replicated, viewed, and managed centrally via a single pane of glass. They are updated in a unified way, at a regular cadence, and at the push of a button. This dramatically simplifies the IT management experience, increases development velocity, and improves the working lives of developers.

The dramatic improvements to operational efficiency included new environment provisioning being possible 80% faster than before, in minutes versus hours, meaning the time that had been dedicated to manual configuration and security could now be spent more usefully.

With SUSE Rancher, Inacta has managed to drive a significant reduction in costs, estimating that its cloud expenditure has reduced by at least a third, despite boasting more functionality and scalability than before.

Ease of integration has been an important benefit too. Thanks to SUSE Rancher’s built-in Azure plugin, Inacta was able to carry out the entire integration and migrate the authentication process in a matter of minutes.

Click here to find out more about how Inacta has scaled its business with SUSE Rancher, whilst increasing operational efficiency and reducing costs.