This customer develops and operates a global communications network and software platform, powering billions of calls and messages each year. Its platform helps companies worldwide to launch and scale communication services without limits. The company serves customers across Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America.
At-a-Glance
This Australian telco counts on continuous technological innovation to deliver cutting-edge communications solutions to customers worldwide. When the rising cost of running Kubernetes on public cloud platforms threatened to dull its development edge, the company decided to embrace a new private cloud platform. With Rancher Prime as its core platform for managing Kubernetes, the company has the scale and flexibility of a cloud native, microservices approach, while gaining greater efficiency, improved transparency and 70% operating cost savings.
Migrating containers from a public to a private cloud
The company got its start more than 20 years ago as a telecommunications network. Today, it has grown into much more, offering a complete technology stack for launching, scaling and managing communication services in the cloud.
Its strategy of building services in the public cloud was originally an economical choice that helped it scale quickly. The company has steadily evolved to a software deployment model predominantly made up of serverless and containerized components. But as the business grew, so did the costs of running workloads such as Kubernetes clusters in the public cloud.
This prompted the company to re-evaluate its strategy and move toward a hybrid model. The company started building up its own private cloud infrastructure and needed a way to manage containerized workloads there effectively.
A manager of core platforms at the company, explains: “We wanted to enable a container hosting and orchestration platform within our private cloud. The aim was to give software development teams an equivalent experience to what they were used to with public cloud.”
“It was a pretty simple decision to go with Rancher Prime and RKE2. We liked the added reassurance of a vendor-backed solution versus a vanilla Kubernetes deployment.”
Manager, Core Platforms
Australian Telco
Why Rancher Prime and RKE2?
The customer launched the search for a container management platform, considering offerings from four major providers. That included SUSE, who put forward a compelling proposal for Rancher Prime. After completing a desktop evaluation of Rancher Prime and Rancher Kubernetes Engine 2 (RKE2), the customer was convinced that SUSE’s solution was the right choice for supporting its multi-cluster, hybrid cloud architecture.
The manager recalls: “In the end, it was a pretty simple decision to go with Rancher Prime and RKE2. We liked the added reassurance of a vendor-backed solution versus a vanilla Kubernetes deployment. And in contrast to some managed Kubernetes platforms, which were eye-wateringly expensive, SUSE made a very commercially attractive proposal.”
In late 2023, the customer began deploying Rancher Prime using a regional hub and spoke model. The primary hub is located in Sydney, the home base of the company’s core application stack and private cloud infrastructure. A second hub sits in Singapore, at the heart of the company’s Southeast Asia operations.
Following a hybrid strategy, the customer has now migrated all but two of its Kubernetes clusters to the private cloud. Rancher Prime provides a single point of control for managing Kubernetes clusters in its own cloud.
As the manager notes: “Our choice of cloud is based on the best place to run each workload. For most of our Kubernetes clusters, that means private cloud. We can also burst into public clouds when we need extra capacity or have to respond to a short-term requirement fast.”
The customer currently runs a range of workloads in Kubernetes, underpinned by Rancher Prime. They include voice network nodes, operations support and billing systems, customer portals and other software architecture components.
The impact of Rancher Prime and RKE2
Saves $25,000 AUD each month
Rancher Prime provides the core platforms team at the company with a highly efficient, consistent way to deploy, manage and scale Kubernetes clusters running in its private cloud. The new approach also reduces reliance on any one cloud provider, while driving down operating costs.
The manager confirms: “We’re seeing operating cost savings in the region of 70% with Kubernetes running in Rancher Prime on our private cloud. In terms of capital expenditure, we're saving $25,000 Australian dollars each month, or $300k AUD a year. For two months' worth of public cloud costs, we purchased the hardware that underpins our cloud platform.”
Open and secure
With Rancher Prime and RKE2, the company can take advantage of a container management solution that’s flexible and open by nature, backed by the reliability and security that SUSE brings as a proven enterprise software provider.
“Having a vendor-backed solution like Rancher Prime gives us that added peace of mind,” says the manager. “SUSE’s model of wrapping its enterprise capabilities around an open source platform is the ideal combination for us.”
Greater visibility and control
The quality of the tooling and transparency offered by Rancher Prime has also been a significant step-up from the customer’s previous experience with public cloud providers.
The manager comments: “With Rancher Prime, I have full visibility of what’s happening in our Kubernetes clusters, how they're scaling and how they're being utilized. It’s a much greater level of insight than I ever had in the public cloud.”
What’s next for this customer?
With core Kubernetes clusters in Sydney and Singapore now migrated to Rancher Prime in the private cloud, the company continues to advance its hybrid strategy, moving workloads in other regions to its private cloud platform as appropriate.
As its Rancher Prime landscape grows, the company is also considering introducing SUSE Premium Support Services and NeuVector Prime container security to lift protection and support to the next level.
The manager concludes: “We’re very pleased with all that we’ve achieved with SUSE so far. We look forward to building on that partnership to keep our business on a path of continuous improvement and innovation.”