DICTU (Dienst ICT Uitvoering) is part of the Ministry of Economic Affairs in the Netherlands. DICTU develops and maintains over 1,500 systems and applications, supporting over 16,000 workstations used by employees across various government ministries and agencies, including the Ministry of Economic Affairs.
At-a-Glance
Public sector IT service provider DICTU is leveraging SUSE Rancher Prime to support its evolution to a modern, microservices architecture. With SUSE Rancher Prime, DICTU can effortlessly scale its container-based environment while retaining complete control over its data and infrastructure — all while achieving development cost savings of 25%.
Modernizing monolithic applications to microservices
DICTU develops and manages a wide range of applications and services. These include business management systems, websites, mobile apps, digital workplace solutions and specialized applications for subsidies, inspections and registers. Together, these solutions directly support tens of thousands of government employees and indirectly impact millions of citizens and residents across the Netherlands. Historically, DICTU delivered these solutions as monolithic applications, which were large, tightly coupled and difficult to update quickly — limiting DICTU’s ability to rapidly respond to evolving needs.
DICTU began its containerization journey during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it was tasked with developing a new access-provisioning service (known as TVS) for Dutch healthcare organizations. Acting as a bridge between digital healthcare portals and identity verification services, TVS needed to be up and running as quickly as possible to meet increased healthcare demands. Shifting from monolithic architectures to a microservices-based approach allowed DICTU to rapidly build, test, deploy and maintain this critical service much faster than with a traditional monolithic approach.
“Going from a community platform to an enterprise-supported solution has been transformative. We’ve seen first-hand the value that SUSE delivers with SUSE Rancher Prime. It gives us great peace of mind to have the backing of a proven European partner.”
Pieter Steendam,
Product Owner, DICTU Container Management Platform,
Dienst ICT Uitvoering
Why SUSE Rancher Prime?
DICTU began using community Rancher as its Kubernetes management platform during the development of TVS. Following SUSE’s acquisition of Rancher Labs, they transitioned to SUSE Rancher Prime. The shift to SUSE Rancher Prime provided DICTU with enterprise-grade support, validated enterprise tooling and regular security and compliance updates — crucial advantages that enhance their ability to confidently scale Kubernetes in production.
Pieter Steendam, Product Owner of DICTU Container Management Platform at DICTU, explains: “We liked that SUSE Rancher Prime retained its open source DNA while offering critical enterprise support and additional security assurances. This allowed us to maintain flexibility and future-proof our infrastructure.”
DICTU deployed SUSE Rancher Prime as an on-premises solution, covering its Oracle Private Cloud Appliance (PCA) and VMware FlexPod environments. Today, SUSE Rancher Prime centrally manages Kubernetes clusters that underpin vital applications and services across multiple government agencies.
“We’ve built up good knowledge of Kubernetes and SUSE Rancher Prime over the years,” notes Steendam. “But we are still a small team and, as our container landscape has grown, so too have the demands on our internal resources. Having SUSE experts available to fill the gaps is a real advantage.”
The impact of SUSE Rancher Prime
Accelerates mission-critical public services
With its initial community Rancher deployment, DICTU delivered the critical TVS service in under two months, providing fast and secure access to digital healthcare services for people across the Netherlands at a time of historic demand.
Since then, SUSE Rancher Prime has become a cornerstone of the DICTU Container Management Platform offering (DCMP). Over a period of six months, DICTU noted a 40% increase in DCMP usage, driven in part by government departments launching new services and scaling existing applications to meet growing internal and external demand. The speed and ease of building new containerized environments on SUSE Rancher Prime are accelerating the digital transformation of services for the Ministry of Economic Affairs in the Netherlands.
“The increase in platform resource usage is a clear indicator of the growing importance of SUSE Rancher Prime at DICTU,” says Steendam. “It has become a vital enabler of our transformation to modern microservices.”
Powers flexible and cost-effective development
SUSE Rancher Prime has helped DICTU transition from monolithic applications to a more flexible development approach that embraces DevOps and containerization. This allows development teams to work more independently and deliver services faster, improving agility across the organization.
What’s more, the shift to containers is significantly reducing development costs. DICTU estimates that it’s saving around 25% on deploying new container-based applications, with like-for-like migrations from its monolithic architecture delivering the biggest improvement in cost efficiencies.
Enhances agility through CI/CD workflows
Embracing SUSE Rancher Prime has significantly accelerated DICTU’s shift toward agile development practices, particularly through Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) workflows. This transition enables DICTU’s teams to rapidly iterate, test, deploy and maintain containerized applications with minimal downtime.
Steendam highlights this capability: “With SUSE Rancher Prime supporting our CI/CD pipelines, we have dramatically improved the speed and reliability of application deployments. It’s been instrumental in meeting the rapidly evolving requirements we faced during the pandemic and continues to enable rapid innovation.”
Strengthens operational confidence with enterprise-grade support
With SUSE delivering enterprise-grade support services, DICTU can confidently deploy Kubernetes in production at scale. With access to SUSE’s expert technical support and comprehensive online resources, DICTU can rest assured that assistance is available whenever needed.
Additionally, DICTU highly values SUSE’s role in enhancing the Rancher ecosystem. This includes providing validated tools for observability and security, supported by comprehensive service-level agreements (SLAs). SUSE also provides a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) that supports security and compliance reporting and helps DICTU defend its technical choices both internally and externally.
“Going from a community platform to an enterprise-supported solution has been transformative,” states Steendam. “We’ve seen first-hand the value that SUSE delivers with SUSE Rancher Prime. It gives us great peace of mind to have the backing of a proven European partner.”
What’s next for DICTU?
As its use of containerization continues to grow, DICTU expects SUSE solutions and professional services to play a key role in supporting agile, efficient development of digital applications and services.
Steendam concludes: “As we scale our containerization strategy, SUSE solutions adapt with us, enabling our teams to rapidly deliver new applications while maintaining high reliability and security. Our partnership with SUSE puts us in a strong position to deliver excellent digital services for the public sector and the people it serves."