Founded in 1968 as a telecommunications company, Lumen Technologies is reinventing itself as the trusted network for artificial intelligence (AI). Having landed major network capacity deals with hyperscalers including AWS, Microsoft and Google, Lumen is scaling up to deliver high-capacity datacenter-to-datacenter connectivity through its growing fiber network. The company currently operates 12.6 million fiber miles and is building an additional 34 million miles of fiber infrastructure to meet soaring demand from AI and cloud workloads.
At-a-Glance
Lumen Technologies is transforming from a traditional telco to a key player in powering the AI future. As it builds 34 million miles of fiber network to connect customers’ data centers, the company is embracing a modern container-based architecture in the cloud for its key systems. Lumen collaborated with SUSE partner Technologent, who created a solution specifically designed for its transition to the SUSE Rancher Suite. With SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE Security at the core of this new landscape, Lumen has the agility and resilience it needs to grow into new markets.
Lumen Simplifies Multi-Cloud & Powers AI with SUSE® Rancher Prime
“Rancher Prime is helping us build better capabilities and knowledge as an infrastructure engineering team. Ultimately, this allows us to add value to all of our users, application teams, end users and products.”
Migrating to a multi-cloud strategy
As part of its strategic evolution, Lumen is transforming the way it operates on an architectural level by migrating workloads from its on-premises datacenters into a flexible, multi-cloud infrastructure.
Andy Reese, Director of Infrastructure Engineering at Lumen, explains: “As a legacy telecom provider, we have datacenters in locations all around the country, which came with considerable cost and complexity. Moving to a multi-cloud model allowed us to simplify and modernize our IT landscape, so we could be ready for the next phase of growth.”
As part of its move to the cloud, Lumen decided that an approach based on microservices and containerization was ideal for keeping software development fast and flexible. The company was already making use of multiple open source container orchestration platforms in its on-premises environment.
With the step up to cloud, Lumen wanted to refine its containerization strategy. It looked for a single enterprise-grade platform, capable of managing and securing Kubernetes clusters at scale.
Why Technologent and SUSE?
Having collaborated for over a decade, Lumen turned to its long-time technology partner, Technologent, for guidance in modernizing its IT infrastructure. When Lumen committed to a multi-cloud strategy and set out to modernize its container platform, Technologent recommended SUSE Rancher Suite as the ideal solution.
Working closely with the SUSE account team, Technologent scoped and designed a container management environment tailored to Lumen’s evolving needs. That collaboration led to a successful proof of concept in 2022 and paved the way for a broader rollout.
“Technologent has been a great partner,” says Reese. “They worked with the SUSE account team for proper scoping and pricing. They continue to provide technical support to ensure we’re leveraging the features we’re paying for. Technologent has been proactive and visible.”
Tony Fagler, Master Solutions Architect at Technologent, adds: “This collaboration let us create a solution specifically designed for Lumen’s transition to the SUSE Rancher Suite. With Technologent and SUSE engineers by its side, Lumen felt confident navigating this migration process, ensuring they hit all the right implementation marks.”
“Participating in SUSE Cloud Elevate gave Technologent a competitive edge,” says Fagler. Designed to help partners deliver SUSE solutions quickly and efficiently, the program simplifies procurement through hyperscaler marketplaces. In Lumen’s case, it enabled the successful execution of the company’s first Microsoft Multiparty Private Offer (MPO).
By leveraging its Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC), Lumen was able to apply pre-committed cloud spend and avoid procurement delays. What might have required six approval steps was completed in just two, with final acceptance through the Azure Marketplace in less than 24 hours.
“This strategic partnership made the whole process smoother, quicker and more budget friendly,” says Fagler.
Why SUSE Rancher Suite?
Aside from the procurement benefits of working with SUSE and Technologent, Lumen chose to adopt the SUSE Rancher Suite for its simplicity, flexibility and comprehensive feature set. By selecting a unified solution, Lumen gains a complete Kubernetes orchestration platform that integrates SUSE Rancher Prime, SUSE Security and SUSE Storage — all backed by trusted enterprise support.
Rancher Prime: standardizes and streamlines Kubernetes management
Rancher Prime serves as the all-in-one container management platform at the core of Lumen’s cloud native transformation. It simplifies operations and standardizes infrastructure across environments, allowing Lumen to replace a fragmented mix of orchestration platforms — including OpenShift, Mesos and open source Kubernetes — with a single, enterprise-grade solution.
“We chose SUSE Rancher Prime to simplify our operations,” says Reese. “My team tells me all the time about the good relationship and the support that we’ve received. It’s been phenomenal.”
With Rancher Prime in place, Lumen’s engineering team can focus their efforts, develop deeper expertise and manage workloads more efficiently across on-premises and public cloud environments.
SUSE Security: enforces policies, supports compliance and hardens container environments
SUSE Security extends the value of Rancher Prime by introducing consistent governance across containerized workloads. The platform provides continuous monitoring and enforcement throughout the development lifecycle, helping Lumen enforce best practices and meet compliance requirements from the start. Deep integration with Kubernetes policies gives the team granular control over admission rules, access privileges and workload behaviors — creating a stable and secure foundation for multi-cloud operations.
SUSE Storage: ensures resilient, scalable storage for Kubernetes workloads
SUSE Storage rounds out the suite by enabling reliable, scalable data persistence for stateful applications running in Kubernetes. As Lumen modernizes legacy workloads and migrates to the cloud, SUSE Storage ensures the performance, resiliency and portability needed to support its evolving infrastructure and service delivery goals.
Together, these components allow Lumen to modernize confidently with enterprise-grade technology that scales with their ambitions — all while maintaining operational consistency and minimizing risk.
What’s more, adds Fagler, “Lumen gains the perks of open source technologies backed by SUSE’s top-notch support, guaranteeing stability, scalability and cost efficiency in its service delivery.”
The impact of SUSE Rancher Prime
Accelerates multi-cloud execution and unlocks operational scale
Since implementation, Rancher Prime has become a cornerstone of Lumen’s multi-cloud operations. By unifying workload management across on-premises and cloud environments, the platform has significantly reduced operational overhead and accelerated time to deployment.
Lumen’s infrastructure team can now move workloads seamlessly between providers like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud without refactoring — a level of flexibility that is critical to the company’s hybrid cloud vision.
“Rancher Prime gives us the ability to very easily move workloads between cloud providers,” says Reese. “It gives us flexibility and prepares us for rapid change.”
This agility is especially important as Lumen shifts hundreds of legacy applications to modern, containerized architectures. Rancher Prime’s consistent interface and developer-friendly controls help the team maintain velocity and standardization, even at scale.
Increases engineering efficiency and accelerates modernization
Consolidating to Rancher Prime as its single container orchestration platform allows Lumen to improve engineering efficiency while enabling Reese and his team to gain valuable knowledge. Instead of taking care of multiple platforms with different requirements, the team can focus its attention on Rancher Prime and develop deep skills.
“Rancher Prime is helping us build better capabilities and knowledge as an infrastructure engineering team,” notes Reese. “Ultimately, this allows us to add value to all of our users, application teams, end users and products.”
Enabled by Rancher Prime’s simplicity, Lumen is now focused on migrating hundreds of legacy workloads, modernizing them and refactoring applications into Kubernetes — a critical step toward future-ready, cloud native operations.
The impact of SUSE Security
By integrating SUSE Security with Rancher Prime from day one, Lumen has built robust foundations for its multi-cloud infrastructure. In particular, Reese likens the admission control features of SUSE Security to having “house rules” for the company’s cloud environment. Zero-trust security allows Lumen to enforce consistent policies and guidelines for all new workloads, ensuring stability and security. For example, the company has limits on the number of CPU cores that people can request, ensuring that no one team or application monopolizes compute resources.
Reese says: “With SUSE Security, we can impose basic ‘house rules’ from the word go. It means that everyone follows the same guidance on how they need to operate in this environment. In the end, everybody wins because we have an environment that’s more secure and certainly more stable.”
He adds that features like run-as-root detection and quota enforcement have proven essential to operational control, especially as Lumen accelerates its migration to the cloud.
These controls bring the governance strategy to life — ensuring that policies aren’t just defined, but actively enforced across environments, helping Lumen maintain a secure, consistent experience even as infrastructure scales.
What’s next for Lumen?
With open and secure SUSE solutions at the heart of its new multi-cloud landscape, Lumen is leading the development of a new generation of AI-ready network solutions. The company sees its partnership with SUSE as a critical enabler of its continued push for growth and innovation. As a result, it is also conducting a proof of concept with SUSE Virtualization, further exploring how SUSE’s open ecosystem can help modernize legacy workloads and meet future performance needs.
Reese concludes: “I see SUSE and Lumen evolving together as we grow in the cloud. It’s exciting to see continued development and new features being baked in. And the ability to purchase Rancher Prime through the Azure marketplace has helped us towards our spend commitment and allowed us to simplify purchasing.”