Founded in a living room in regional Victoria in 2003, Aussie Broadband has grown into a publicly listed company on the Australian Securities Exchange with annual revenues approaching A$1 billion and a market capitalization of A$1.2 billion. With 1,300 employees, it is the fifth-largest retail internet provider in Australia, serving over 780,000 broadband connections and accounting for nearly 9% of all National Broadband Network (NBN) services in the country.
At-a-Glance
Aussie Broadband’s rapid growth outpaced its legacy infrastructure, making it clear that a modernized, scalable platform was needed. To improve reliability, availability and efficiency while establishing common core platforms across the company, Aussie Broadband implemented a full cloud native stack with SUSE. The solution — including SUSE Rancher Prime, RKE2, SUSE Virtualization, SUSE Security, SUSE Linux Micro, SUSE Consulting Services and SUSE Platinum eLearning — enabled the company to create a unified cloud hosting platform for its services and operations. This transformation streamlined deployments, reducing Kubernetes cluster provisioning time by up to 98%, and delivered operational efficiencies of 20-30%.
Building a high-performance private cloud
“We want a stack that is simple to manage, efficient, and reliable. We found that SUSE really gives us that.”
Building a high-performance private cloud
Aussie Broadband’s rapid growth, both organically and through acquisitions, led to an increasingly complex technology landscape. Committed to disrupting the telco space with exceptional customer service and a high-speed network, the company recognized the need for a major IT transformation to support its business objectives.
This strategy had two primary goals: to establish a common core platform across the company and to enhance the reliability, availability and efficiency of its operations. To achieve this, Aussie Broadband leveraged Kubernetes to build a modern private cloud platform, delivered on-premises via co-location data centers across Australia.
The engineers initially deployed Kubernetes using ‘vanilla’ Kubeadm clusters, but the manual configuration required led to challenges. Version upgrades were cumbersome, taking up to two days to complete as the upgrade process had to be meticulously followed and managed. And while some open source management tools were available, the platform lacked a single, cohesive pane of glass for Kubernetes. This limited visibility, making capacity management difficult and causing performance issues that eroded business confidence in the platform.
The company’s SecOps team also flagged security risks, recognizing that these manual processes and gaps in visibility increased operational risks. “As a telco and providing broadband services, we are classed as an essential service,” says Ben O’Shea, General Manager Transformation & Cloud at Aussie Broadband. “So any downtime within that ISP network is a really big deal. Having a set of platforms that allows us to maintain availability of our core ISP services, but also our core customer services, is absolutely critical for our business."
Additionally, the company also realized that continuing to rely on proprietary solutions such as VMware vSphere would negatively impact its bottom line on account of rising subscription costs. With an upcoming VMware renewal, Aussie Broadband needed a cost-effective, scalable solution capable of managing both virtual machines (VMs) and containerized workloads for its fully cloud native environment.
To address these challenges, Aussie Broadband launched an extensive RFP process to identify a technology partner that could help build its internal cloud platform and support its transformation objectives. After considering solutions from Red Hat, VMware and Canonical, Aussie Broadband awarded the project to SUSE.
“We did a fairly stringent evaluation,” says O’Shea. “We looked at a number of open source and commercial vendors, and the customer references for SUSE and their support were exceptional — and that was a big part of the decision going forward.”
Why SUSE solutions?
As a publicly listed company accountable to shareholders, Aussie Broadband needed a solution that not only delivered efficiency and operational benefits but was also cost effective, scalable and future-ready. After evaluating multiple vendors, SUSE emerged as the best fit, offering robust virtualization abilities and a comprehensive cloud native solution that includes: SUSE Rancher Prime, SUSE Linux Micro, RKE2, SUSE Virtualization and SUSE Security, along with additional enterprise-grade tools.
SUSE Rancher Prime provided a unified platform for hosting all of Aussie Broadband’s workloads, giving the company centralized control over its core technology assets through a single-pane-of-glass management interface. The solution also aligned perfectly with the company's strategic plan to consolidate legacy infrastructure, retire commercial virtualization solutions and significantly reduce software licensing costs.
The company determined that SUSE’s cloud native solutions would help streamline operations by consolidating its fragmented infrastructure. They would also be capable of supporting key strategic projects, such as enhancing ISP-critical services (DHCP/RADIUS/DNS/Telemetry), migrating and retiring Docker Swarm clusters, evacuating and decommissioning existing VMWare environments, and deploying new applications such as the NetSIP self-service portal for Aussie Broadband’s voice customers.
After choosing SUSE’s cloud native solutions, Aussie Broadband also decided to adopt SUSE Consulting Services and SUSE Platinum eLearning to ensure enterprise-level support and expert guidance throughout the transformation process.
The impact of SUSE solutions
Aussie Broadband integrated SUSE Rancher Prime, SUSE Virtualization, SUSE Linux Micro and SUSE Security into its private cloud platform tech stack that includes: Cisco Nexus for VXLAN EVPN networking, Cisco UCS for compute, NetApp AFF for fabric-attached storage and Pure Storage Portworx for software-defined storage.
By doing so, Aussie Broadband achieved a major milestone in its digital transformation, gaining significant efficiency, enhanced security and improved scalability across its IT infrastructure. With a modernized, cloud native approach, the company now benefits from faster deployments, streamlined operations, enhanced automation and an improved security posture.
Up to 98% faster deployments and increased productivity
Using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with SUSE Rancher Prime, Aussie Broadband cut Kubernetes deployment times from up to two days to just one to two hours — up to a 98% reduction.
“Delivering new virtual machines or new container instances can take anywhere from one to two days,” says O’Shea. “With the automation that we've been able to achieve on top of the SUSE platform, we've got that down to one to two hours.”
This acceleration significantly improves time-to-market for new services. SUSE Rancher Prime’s automated cluster lifecycle management further reduces operational overhead by automating OS and Kubernetes version upgrades, cluster certificate management and backups — eliminating previously manual, time-consuming tasks. Developers can now focus on delivering business value rather than managing infrastructure, leading to increased productivity.
Established a common cloud hosting platform
One of Aussie Broadband’s key objectives was to standardize and consolidate its infrastructure across acquisitions and business units. By adopting SUSE’s cloud native solutions, the company established a common cloud hosting platform with hyperscaler-like functionality but within a private cloud. This approach ensures greater control over the customer and technical experience, avoiding the commercial complexities and costs of public cloud hyperscalers.
Unified management of VMs and Kubernetes clusters
Enabling enterprises to run VM workloads on Kubernetes, SUSE Virtualization has bridged the gap between Aussie Broadband’s legacy VMs and cloud native infrastructure. By consolidating VMs and Kubernetes clusters into a single, intuitive management interface, Aussie Broadband has simplified IT operations, allowing teams to efficiently manage workloads across on-premises and cloud environments. This unified approach enhances resource utilization and operational efficiency.
Strengthened security and compliance
With SUSE Rancher Prime’s built-in automation tools, Aussie Broadband can accelerate deployments with confidence, knowing that secure configurations are applied automatically, reducing human error and misconfigurations. SUSE Security has also strengthened the company’s overall security posture, providing real-time runtime protection to safeguard critical workloads. It also provides automated compliance enforcement to ensure adherence to industry standards and requirements.
Optimized cost and resource efficiency
By leveraging SUSE’s cloud native solutions, Aussie Broadband has also achieved significant cost efficiencies across hardware, data center space and software licensing. The new cloud platform reduces infrastructure sprawl, enabling better resource optimization and cost control. The company now benefits from a smaller data center footprint while maintaining high levels of performance and availability.
“At the end of the day, SUSE has helped us achieve 20 to 30% efficiency on our day-to-day operations,” says O’Shea.
Strategic support and skill development
SUSE Consulting Services and SUSE Platinum eLearning are helping to ensure Aussie Broadband’s long-term success. With expert guidance on designing and optimizing its cloud platform through SUSE Consulting Services, and structured learning paths for internal teams to upskill on SUSE technologies through SUSE Platinum eLearning, Aussie Broadband’s investment in skill development ensures its IT teams can fully leverage SUSE solutions to support future business growth and innovation.
“SUSE Consulting Services and Platinum eLearning have been fantastic for filling in the gaps,” says Andrew Hainsworth, Platform Manager at Aussie Broadband. “Having that help and experience is really accelerating the process.”
Enhanced customer experience for 650,000 residential broadband users
By leveraging SUSE solutions for critical edge deployments, Aussie Broadband has built a more reliable, resilient, and efficient ISP platform directly benefiting its 650,000 residential broadband customers, significantly enhancing their overall service quality and internet experience.
“Being able to run a more reliable, resilient, efficient platform means that those applications which directly impact our end customers, and their ability to get on the internet, are more available, running faster and can service the customer better,” says O’Shea. “It directly impacts those end customers and translates into a more positive customer experience.”
What’s next for Aussie Broadband?
Aussie Broadband’s Kubernetes footprint will continue to grow, with deployments extending across more than ten facilities in five Australian states. With SUSE Rancher Prime’s single-pane-of-glass management and built-in role-based access controls (RBAC), the platform engineering team will be able to efficiently manage user access across sites as the infrastructure scales.
Looking ahead, Aussie Broadband anticipates leveraging SUSE Telco Edge solutions to support strategic edge deployments, enhancing critical ISP workloads, and are exploring AI capabilities with the SUSE AI platform to drive further innovation.
These advancements will fuel Aussie Broadband’s ongoing transformation, reinforcing its position as a disruptor in Australia’s telco market. With SUSE’s cloud native solutions, the company is well-equipped to deliver superior customer experiences while driving significant operational and cost efficiencies for years to come.