Established in 1996, 104 Corporation is a leading human resources platform from Taiwan. It became the first internet company listed in Taiwan in 2006 and remains one of the most visited human resources service websites in the country.
For three decades, 104 Corporation has not only served job seekers and corporate clients but also handled over 100 million API requests daily, requiring high stability and scalability in its infrastructure. Customer demands keep growing and straining legacy applications. Building a more flexible and efficient IT architecture has become crucial for 104 Corporation to maintain its competitive edge.
At-a-Glance
Taiwan’s leading human resources platform, 104 Corporation, is digitally transforming their outdated workloads and infrastructure with SUSE Rancher Prime as its core Kubernetes management platform to enhance the flexibility and efficiency of its IT architecture. This move has reduced application deployment time by 90%, from several days to under an hour, significantly improving development efficiency and deployment agility. Furthermore, the operations team can now allocate more resources to innovative tasks, accelerating the adoption of cloud native technologies. The company plans to have more than 80% of its applications containerized by 2027.
The journey to SUSE
104 Corporation’s IT team is responsible for maintaining over 300 website services and more than 2,000 containerized applications across all environments. Before containerization, they heavily relied on virtual machines (VMs) for application deployment. However, as business needs grew, the old model revealed several limitations.
Yao-Siang Su, a software architect at 104 Corporation, noted that developers often faced “environment inconsistency” challenges, resulting in significant differences in application performance between local and online environments, which hindered debugging efficiency and development progress.
On the other hand, the operations team struggled with “rigid resource scaling,” requiring manual server expansion to handle peak periods like the post-Lunar New Year job surge, leading to cumbersome processes, high costs and resource idleness during non-peak periods. This situation exacerbated the collaboration gap between development and operations teams due to differing goals and toolchains, catalyzing the urgent need for comprehensive transformation. Ultimately, scaling VMs manually lowered the quality of life of teams needing to be available for emergencies and overseeing manual processes resulting in antipatterns.
104 Corporation’s IT team recognized that a fast, stable Kubernetes-based platform provides developers with consistent environments while helping the operations team manage resources and control costs. The added automation would also free up teams to focus on improving their customer offerings and work culture. After evaluating multiple solutions, 104 Corporation selected SUSE Rancher Prime as the primary platform for driving Kubernetes adoption and embarked on a structural transformation.
“Our deployment time was greatly improved, going from multiple days to under an hour, thanks to the efficiencies brought by SUSE Rancher Prime."
Why SUSE Rancher Prime?
104 Corporation’s IT team chose to adopt SUSE Rancher Prime as its core Kubernetes strategy, effectively overcoming the limitations of legacy architecture barriers to scale, cost and operational efficiency. The success of this transformation was driven by a clear technology selection strategy, a strong focus on developer experience and a solid partnership with technical partners, providing a feasible blueprint for enterprises pursuing digital innovation.
One main reason 104 selected SUSE Rancher Prime is its alignment with open source and cloud native standards set by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
“SUSE Rancher Prime’s design philosophy closely aligns with the cloud native standards promoted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF),” says Yao-Siang Su. “Compared to other solutions that may lead to vendor lock-in, SUSE Rancher Prime natively supports Kubernetes tools, allowing enterprises to build on their existing technology foundations without having to learn proprietary syntax or platforms. This significantly lowers the barriers to adoption and the cost of migration.”
Another key advantage is SUSE’s RKE2 (Rancher Kubernetes Engine 2), it enables IT teams to rapidly deploy and manage multiple secure clusters. This simplifies Kubernetes configuration, reduces manual errors and cuts rework costs. Thanks to these automation capabilities, 104 successfully built more than 10 Kubernetes clusters across on-premises and cloud environments (including AWS and Google Cloud), laying a solid foundation for its hybrid cloud strategy.
The impact of SUSE Rancher Prime
Accelerates application deployment by 90%
104 Corporation’s team designed an internal deployment process and Helm Chart that streamlines container deployment for developers. Without needing to understand the complexities of Kubernetes, developers can now deploy applications to production through a standardized process. This integration with SUSE Rancher Prime has reduced deployment time by 90%, dramatically boosting efficiency and agility.
“Our deployment time was greatly improved, going from multiple days to under an hour, thanks to the efficiencies brought by SUSE Rancher Prime” says Yao-Siang Su. “SUSE saves us significant time that we would otherwise spend on confirming, validating and experimenting independently. Their SA and Support team consistently provide us with prompt responses, which gives us a sense of security and allows us to dedicate more time to learning about Kubernetes and researching CNCF tools.”
Optimizes operations and accelerates cloud native adoption
SUSE Rancher Prime has also transformed operations. Tasks that once required extensive manual effort are now automated, allowing teams to focus on high-value innovation and performance optimization. The company is now driving the adoption of advanced technologies like microservices, observability and service mesh, accelerating its shift to cloud native practices.
“With the automation features of SUSE Rancher Prime, we’ve been able to shift more focus toward innovation and performance improvement,” says Yao-Siang Su. “SUSE has excellent automated installation processes, and their software integrations have been thoroughly validated. It gives us greater confidence in using their tools and we don’t have to worry about potential conflicts between the tools.”
What’s next for 104 Corporation?
As of today, nearly 50% of 104 Corporation’s applications have been migrated to the Kubernetes platform. Seeing the benefits of containerization, the company plans to continue to modernize and reach over 80% containerization by 2027. With SUSE Rancher Prime providing stable technical support and flexible management capabilities, 104 Corporation is confidently modernizing its infrastructure, preparing for future demands in AI, real-time services and multi-cloud management. This cloud native approach will fuel continued innovation and operational excellence.