Founded in 1886, Johannesburg (affectionately called ‘Joburg’ by locals) is the largest city in South Africa and is a thriving hub for business, community and culture. The City of Johannesburg is the local municipal government in this fast-growing city, and it provides a broad range of citizen services, including water and energy, healthcare and emergency services, urban planning, community development and other services.
The City of Johannesburg has several key focus areas aimed at improving the quality of life for its residents and fostering sustainable development:
• Financial Sustainability: Ensuring the city’s financial health and stability.
• Energy Mix: Diversifying energy sources to include more sustainable options.
• Sustainable Service Delivery: Providing reliable and efficient public services.
• Job Opportunity and Creation: Promoting economic growth and job creation.
• Good Governance: Enhancing transparency, accountability and effective governance.
• Infrastructure Development: Investing in and maintaining essential infrastructure.
• Safer City: Improving public safety and reducing crime.
• Active and Engaged Citizenry: Encouraging community participation and engagement.
• Sustained Economic Growth: Fostering long-term economic development.
• Green Economy: Promoting environmentally sustainable practices.
• Smart City: Leveraging technology to improve city management and services.
Recently, the City of Johannesburg has begun delivering many of its vital public services via cloud and digital-enabled channels. This has placed additional pressure on the municipality’s Group Information Communication Technology and Information Management (GICT & IM) team, which faces the challenge of supporting a larger number of workloads with limited budgets. To address rising demands, the municipality’s GICT & IM department is working to transform its Information Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure, targeting higher performance, greater flexibility, enhanced security and simplified ICT management.
At-a-Glance
Over 5.6 million people rely on the City of Johannesburg to provide emergency services, healthcare, social support and much more. The city’s motto, “Service with Pride,” upholds a commitment to being responsive to the needs of the community and ensures a clean, green, healthy and safe urban environment through regional coordination, integration, monitoring and enforcement of service delivery standards at the grass-roots level. To keep vital services running 24/7 and enable cutting-edge smart city innovation, the GICT & IM team at the municipality decided to move from a virtualized serverbased ICT architecture to a new containerized environment built with SUSE Rancher Prime and secured with SUSE Security. In parallel, moving to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications will pave the way for the organization to move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, which will ensure faster application performance and support even more responsive services.
The journey to SUSE and containerization
For years, the City of Johannesburg has supported many of its core activities — including billing residents for water, electricity, municipal taxes and more — using a combination of SAP ERP and Microsoft-based applications, running in a hybrid on-premises and private cloud environment.
While this approach enabled the City of Johannesburg to deliver seamless services, the traditional server-based architecture made it costly to license the required software and very time-consuming to develop and manage new applications. To cut costs, maximize and optimize their ICT workloads, and gain enhanced capabilities, the municipality set out to upgrade its existing SAP ERP (SAP 4.7) to SAP S/4HANA Cloud for future deployment via RISE with SAP. The upgrade is a comprehensive offering designed to help the city transition their on-premises SAP ERP systems to the hybrid cloud capability, which includes tools, services and infrastructure to facilitate this migration, making it smoother and more secure.
For its other key business applications, the municipality decided to transition from a traditional virtualized, server-based ICT infrastructure to a more flexible and modern containerized architecture. Taking this new approach would not only improve operational efficiency for the IT team, but it would also help the municipality adopt artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), big data (BD) and internet-of-things (IoT) solutions — a big step toward completing Johannesburg’s smart city journey.
John Bosco Arends, Group Head of Information and Network Technology Operations, GICT & IM at the City of Johannesburg, explains: “Historically, each of our 14 entities and respective group departments effectively ran their own ICT systems. Our goal was to establish a centralized, shared-services-driven and cloud-first ICT environment through containerization, which offered the best route to ensure consistent performance, security and reliability while also gaining the agility to innovate.”
To achieve maximum flexibility and avoid vendor lock-in, the City of Johannesburg looked to build a new containerized platform using open source solutions, targeting the following goals:
- Improved Application Performance with Containers: Ensuring consistent performance across various infrastructures and reducing delays caused by different environments, allowing for rapid deployment of updates and features.
- Scalability of Containers: Making it easier to scale applications up or down seamlessly, accommodating fluctuating demands. This is particularly useful during peak times, such as holiday shopping seasons or sudden increases in user traffic.
- Enhanced Security: Providing robust security features, including role-based access control (RBAC), built-in zero trust security policies and compliance with industry standards.
- Reduced Downtime: Maintaining high availability and fault tolerance by distributing applications across multiple environments. This ensures redundancy and minimizes single points of failure, keeping applications running smoothly even during hardware or software failures.
- Resource Optimization: Achieving more efficient use of resources as containers are lightweight compared to traditional virtual machines, resulting in cost savings and better utilization of existing infrastructure.
- Ease of Management: Simplifying the management of containerized applications, providing tools for orchestration, scaling and securing containers. This makes it easier for organizations to manage their container environments effectively.
“Early on, we decided to leverage Rancher to manage our containerized environment, but we also wanted to make sure that selecting open source solutions would not mean compromising on our excellent security standards or zero trust policy,” reflects Arends. “Crucially, any new solutions must be able to meet the strict regulatory frameworks that we must follow and satisfy the financial reporting and transparency requirements of the Auditor-General of South Africa.”
“When you are in the business of providing services that save lives, being able to rely on your technology partners is absolutely essential. Availability and security With SUSE, we know that if we run into issues, we can get hands-on support quickly.”
Why Rancher Prime and SUSE Security?
With security front of mind, the City of Johannesburg decided to manage its new containerized environment using Rancher Prime to ensure round-the-clock observability. The municipality also chose to secure its new containers with SUSE Security, which provides advanced threat protection right down to the operating system level.
“Our new containerization initiative marks the very first time that we have adopted a container-based architecture,” says Arends. “Naturally, we wanted to make sure that we were fully supported on this journey and have the very best authentication, access, observability and security controls at our fingertips. With Rancher Prime and SUSE Security we get exactly that, with the added benefit of support from SUSE Premium Support if we ever run into any issues.”
To ensure maximum uptime and maintain rock-solid security, the City of Johannesburg is taking a phased approach to the implementation, beginning with its billing systems. When the migration is complete, the municipality will gain full visibility over all containerized clusters and gain the ability to standardize application management and security features across its entire IT environment. Initially, the City of Johannesburg will deploy Rancher Prime and SUSE Security on Huawei and Cisco hardware, but it aims to eventually move the solutions — along with all containerized environments — to an Azure cloud in the years ahead.
Why SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications and SUSE Multi-Linux Manager?
To lay the foundation for its move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, the City of Johannesburg decided to deploy SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications. In parallel, the municipality chose to implement SUSE Multi-Linux Manager to help it orchestrate and consolidate multiple SAP instances.
“Selecting SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications was a natural choice for us,” comments Arends. “We need to get cloud-ready fast and that means boosting performance. Adopting the latest version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications would help us to achieve that goal.”
The City of Johannesburg selected SUSE Multi-Linux Manager for its compatibility with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SAP solutions, but also because of SUSE’s track record of driving digital transformation in local government institutions. Arends adds: “When you are in the business of providing services that save lives, being able to rely on your technology partners is absolutely essential. We liked that SUSE has an excellent reputation in our sector and has an extensive presence in South Africa. With SUSE Premium Support, we know that if we run into issues, we can get hands-on support quickly.”
The impact of Rancher Prime and SUSE Security
While the City of Johannesburg is still in the early stages of its containerization journey, the municipality expects that the new approach will lead to significant licensing savings.
“With Rancher Prime, I can optimize software licensing for every application, every database and every operating system,” explains Arends. “By consolidating our systems, we will reduce the need for multiple software licenses and release more resources for innovation.”
The City of Johannesburg also expects to dramatically shorten the development cycle for new digital services, which will help the municipality to realize its vision of becoming a smart city even faster. “Rancher Prime makes it much easier for us to spin up environments for building new applications — this means we will be able to provide service updates and brand-new public-facing services quicker than ever before,” says Arends.
Crucially, SUSE Security enables the City of Johannesburg to maintain its zero trust security policy as it transitions to containers. “We know from experience that we are a prime target for cybercriminals,” says Arends. “With SUSE Security, we can lock down our systems and protect citizen data, while still getting all the flexibility of open source software. Rancher Prime also helps us gain full visibility and transparency across our environment, which makes it easier for us to produce reports for internal and external audits.”
The impact of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications and SUSE Multi-Linux Manager
By adopting SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, the City of Johannesburg can ensure a smooth transition to SAP S/4HANA in the coming months: a move that will deliver enhanced performance, provide greater application stability and set the stage for the move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
“SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications helps ensure our missioncritical business systems are running on an up-to-date platform,” says Arends. “And with SUSE Multi-Linux Manager, we can make sure that the entire environment is secure, performant and costeffective.”
What’s next for the City of Johannesburg?
The City of Johannesburg has big plans for the future, and technology will play a significant role in realizing its vision of turning Joburg into a smart city. In the years ahead, the municipality aims to extend its containerized environment to support all its core IT activities and enable the city to leverage the power of AI, ML, IoT, RPA, digitalization, analytics and other cutting-edge technologies to enhance public services.
“Supporting citizens, residents, indigents, businesses, sectorial partners and our people within the geographical boundaries of the city is at the heart of everything we do,” concludes Arends. “New technologies present cost effective, secure and more efficient ways of improving life for the people of Joburg. With container management solutions from SUSE underpinning our operations, we can seize these opportunities for development.”