Resulta underpins global growth strategy with SUSE Rancher

“With a focus on building our international capabilities, it’s critical that our architecture can scale at speed. Kubernetes and SUSE Rancher bring an agile approach to IT that is making our vision a reality.” Jamie Fifield, head of IT operations, Resulta.

In pursuit of global expansion, Canadian marketing services provider Resulta required greater efficiency and agility from its technology infrastructure than server-based architectures could provide. The rapid domestic growth Resulta had experienced, coupled with its global expansion ambitions, heralded the start of a journey towards Kubernetes that can be traced back as far as 2016.

Given the primitive nature of its previous IT stack Resulta found it difficult to expand. The IT team viewed cloud migration as the natural next step towards increasing agility and removing some of the heavy-lifting associated with managing a server-based architecture.

As its cloud strategy accelerated, Resulta moved towards containerization as the preferred route to scaling internationally with limited resources. The team started with Docker, but soon after the limitations of the platform prompted the realization that Kubernetes was the right option. The decision then became which container management platform to choose. Given its flexibility and heterogenous nature, SUSE Rancher was an easy choice.

The journey to global expansion and operational efficiency

To bring its expansion aspirations to life, Resulta needed a platform that would enable it to spin up a new environment in each country seamlessly. By running its infrastructure in Kubernetes and SUSE Rancher, the team found scaling a pain-free process. Soon, the team became confident about managing a greater number of clients with the same number of staff.

It is now 80% faster to spin up a new environment – this now takes minutes instead of hours. Deploying services in a new region is also dramatically easier and quicker – this now takes a matter of hours, compared to days. Reducing support overheads was another pain point Resulta’s IT team was keen to overcome. Previously, production issues could take hours, if not days, to resolve. With SUSE Rancher, the process is simplified with tickets being responded to within minutes as well as a strong, passionate community to rely on. These efficiencies also have a positive impact on Resulta’s own quality assurance process—issues are resolved 80% quicker, with an average resolution time of 20 minutes.

As a company all-in on AWS, Resulta’s cloud costs are a growing concern. It is now actively looking at a multi-cloud strategy to mitigate future rising costs. With that in mind, and a desire to reduce overheads, the company is keen to work with the SUSE Rancher Kubernetes management platform to more closely analyze its cloud costs through a single simple interface; to make the switch to multi-cloud as easy as possible.

The next 12 months for Resulta will see the company continue to focus on global ex­pansion, whilst increasing reliance on SUSE Rancher to target further efficiencies across its evolving architecture.

Click here to find out more about how the deployment of SUSE Rancher gained Resulta the efficiency, agility and scal­ability required to hasten its global growth.