Founded in 1986 in Brusque, Brazil, Havan is a major retail chain with over 180 department stores in 23 of the 26 Brazilian states. Employing around 22,000 people, Havan offers products across a wide range of categories, including home appliances, electronics, tools, clothing, home decor, bedding, bath items, tableware, household goods and auto accessories. In 2026, the year of its 40th anniversary, the company aims to reach 200 megastores and expand its presence to all Brazilian states.
At-a-Glance
To help it support new department stores across Brazil, leading retailer Havan looked for a more reliable and efficient way to manage and scale its mission-critical application infrastructure. With SUSE Rancher Prime, the company improved the availability of its systems and expanded its microservices infrastructure by 500% — all while keeping operational costs low.
Challenges in scaling digital operations
At Havan, digital technology plays an essential role in day-to-day operations: from planning and forecasting to warehouse management, sales and distribution. As the company expanded its reach, demand for these mission-critical business systems was rising, but managing and scaling the existing platform presented increasing challenges.
Havan used this platform to run Kubernetes clusters in support of its digital services, including its ERP and warehouse management systems, purchasing, distribution and billing applications. However, the environment didn’t scale effectively as the company added more retail stores to its portfolio, which sometimes led to reliability and performance concerns during peak periods.
Marcos Girardi, IT Systems Manager at Havan, elaborates: “As we grew, we saw that digital service interruptions were on the rise. In particular, reliability issues with horizontal autoscaling occasionally impacted store operations and disrupted the customer experience at the point of sale. We decided to take action to protect these hard-won customer relationships.”
In addition to reliability concerns, the previous environment added complexity to core DevOps tasks such as managing Kubernetes clusters, updating user access controls and configuring continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
Deinar Bottamedi, DevOps Analyst and Technology Lead at Havan, says: “It was getting more and more time-consuming and resource-intensive just to keep the lights on. We were probably spending around 30 hours per week on this work. Even relatively simple tasks required command-line intervention, making it very difficult for us to quickly push out new services to the business.”
“Enterprise support from SUSE gives us peace of mind that if we experience an urgent issue with our production environment, we’ll get the help we need quickly.”
Marcos Girardi
IT Systems Manager
Havan
Why SUSE Rancher Prime?
To enhance the scalability and reliability of key containerized services, Havan turned to the market to look for an alternative to the tool it was using.
“We evaluated various Kubernetes management solutions, and SUSE Rancher Prime stood out as the frontrunner early on in the process,” recalls Girardi. “We found it simplifies and streamlines management and orchestration of our containerized environment.”
One of the key advantages Havan saw with SUSE Rancher Prime is that it was much more cost-effective than the tool it was using. With SUSE, Havan only pays subscription fees for the number of Rancher Management Servers and Kubernetes nodes in its environment, not the number of clusters — enabling it to scale out without sending costs soaring.
Working with SUSE, Havan successfully migrated from the tool it was using to SUSE Rancher Prime. During the process, Havan ran its applications simultaneously in the tool it was using and Rancher environments to validate the new platform, performing a seamless switchover as soon as each service was stable in SUSE Rancher Prime. Today, Havan uses the SUSE solution to manage its development, testing and production environments.
Impact of SUSE Rancher Prime
Ensures seamless shopping experiences for customers
More than 260 employees at Havan — including developers, architects and DevOps professionals — use SUSE Rancher Prime to support their work and keep customer-facing services running smoothly. Since adopting SUSE Rancher Prime, Havan has eliminated the reliability issues that previously disrupted the store’s systems and applications, protecting the customer experience at the point of sale.
“With SUSE Rancher Prime, we can seamlessly deliver extra resources to our applications during peak retail periods,” says Girardi. “Today, we have the peace of mind that the microservices infrastructure for our store systems and applications will always be available when our customers need it.”
Accelerates development
With SUSE Rancher Prime, Havan has dramatically improved the speed and efficiency of its application delivery. Ad hoc cluster provisioning and application deployment are now faster, enabling development teams to respond quickly to evolving business needs. Thanks to SUSE Rancher Prime’s simplified management capabilities, the company can now adjust its Kubernetes clusters in real time — eliminating the need for time-consuming manual configurations in the command line. Havan estimates that the team now spends around 20 hours per week on management, a 33% reduction.
“SUSE Rancher Prime streamlines tasks such as configuring Horizontal Pod Autoscalers [HPAs], managing persistent storage, adjusting resources, viewing logs and restarting pods,” comments Bottamedi. “This helps our teams focus more on innovation and less on manual processes.”
Simplifies management and security
SUSE Rancher Prime gives Havan centralized visibility and control across all its environments. This unified management experience reduces complexity for IT teams, strengthens governance and simplifies compliance.
“SUSE Rancher Prime provides us with an easier way to manage multiple clusters from a single point of control,” says Girardi.
Security is also easier to manage with a Zero Trust architecture. By integrating SUSE Rancher Prime with its identity provider, Havan can quickly enforce access controls based on existing user groups and apply fine-grained permission controls as needed, improving its security posture without slowing down operations.
Increases microservices by 5x
For Havan, scalability concerns have become a thing of the past. SUSE Rancher Prime has enabled the company to expand its microservices by a factor of five in less than three years while maintaining high levels of performance and reliability.
Today, the company manages thousands of microservices with SUSE Rancher Prime, supporting its mission-critical applications and API-driven infrastructure.
Reduces costs and protects revenue
The flexibility of the SUSE subscription model has enabled Havan to keep operational costs under tight control even as its microservices infrastructure has grown.
Just as important, SUSE Rancher Prime has helped the company avoid the opportunity costs associated with service interruptions at the point of sale, estimated at thousands of dollars per hour. By ensuring the store’s systems and applications remain online during peak periods, Havan protects both revenue and customer loyalty.
Provides enterprise support for fast issue resolution
Since the start of the company’s journey with SUSE Rancher Prime, expert support from SUSE has only been an email or phone call away.
“Enterprise support from SUSE gives us peace of mind that if we experience an urgent issue with our production environment, we’ll get the help we need quickly,” says Girardi. “Once, we had an issue with restoring a system from a backup during a scheduled downtime window. SUSE helped us to pinpoint and resolve the problem rapidly. Knowing that SUSE has our back is very comforting.”
Fosters service innovation
Havan’s DevOps and application development teams can now manage Kubernetes environments with greater confidence and autonomy, helping them to work more efficiently. For example, developers can now access logs and perform basic scaling actions without needing intervention from the DevOps team, which helps accelerate the delivery of new versions. Including the time required to create a delivery pipeline, new applications can be delivered in 20 to 30 minutes, assuming a pre-configured namespace is available.
“Without a doubt, our move to SUSE Rancher Prime has helped accelerate digital transformation initiatives at Havan,” confirms Bottamedi.
What’s next for Havan?
Building on its success with SUSE Rancher Prime, Havan plans to enhance its microservices environment by implementing Rancher Kubernetes Engine 2 (RKE2) — helping the company to further optimize resource allocation as it adds new clusters.
“We see that our relationship with SUSE will continue for years to come,” Girardi concludes. “In addition to working with SUSE to implement RKE2, we intend to explore how SUSE Virtualization can help us unlock greater operational efficiency by managing virtualized and containerized workloads through a single pane of glass.”