Eindhoven is a city and municipality in the Netherlands with 249,000 residents. At the municipality of Eindhoven (Dutch: Gemeente Eindhoven), 2,700 employees deliver vital public services to residents like transportation, infrastructure, education and more.
At-a-Glance
The municipality of Eindhoven in the Netherlands worked with its trusted private cloud provider Fundaments to migrate key business processes to a microservices-based architecture. Eindhoven accelerated development workflows threefold with a new platform powered by SUSE Rancher Suite and delivered by Fundaments as a fully managed service in a sovereign data center.
Modernizing services with containers
Across the Netherlands, municipalities are striving to deliver more responsive and effective public services within increasingly constrained budgets. Like many local government organizations, the municipality of Eindhoven sees technology as an opportunity to streamline service delivery while empowering residents to engage more closely with their local government.
Eindhoven previously relied on monolithic applications to handle everything from social care to passport applications. However, these applications were becoming complex, costly to maintain and difficult to integrate with other platforms in use across other municipal and national government bodies.
To accelerate the delivery of new digital services, Eindhoven embraced a new approach to development. Following DevOps principles, the municipality aimed to adopt microservices-based applications running on Docker containers and managed with Kubernetes.
For the last two years, Eindhoven has relied on its trusted technology partner Fundaments to deliver, manage and maintain its infrastructure. From a secure data center location in Eindhoven, Fundaments provides Eindhoven with an infrastructure-as-a-service platform for its mission-critical applications, backed by robust service-level guarantees.
Based on this excellent track record, Eindhoven engaged Fundaments to help it transition from monolithic applications on virtual machines to microservices on containers.
Eindhoven outlined several core requirements for Fundaments. One was to ensure the new capabilities aligned with the standards and best practices of Common Ground, a coalition of public-private partners that includes municipal governments, IT suppliers and technology companies.
Ron Boscu, Manager, Marketing and Sales at Fundaments, says: “Common Ground aims to enable municipalities to improve service delivery, comply with the latest privacy legislation and defend against evolving cyber risks by streamlining the provision of information. To achieve these goals, municipalities must transform the way they process data — moving from siloed, monolithic systems to integrated microservices.”
To formalize the Common Ground approach, the Association of Dutch Municipalities (Dutch: Vereniging van Nederlandse Gemeenten, or VNG) developed Haven, a standard for platform-independent cloud hosting for Dutch municipalities. Part of the Common Ground program, the Haven standard is designed to enable municipalities to develop interoperable and reusable microservices-based applications.
“Eindhoven wanted a Kubernetes cluster that was compliant with the Haven standard,” explains Larik-Jan Verschuren-Parchomov, CTO at Fundaments. “It was also very important to ensure data sovereignty, which meant that using a hyperscaler was out of the question.”
“SUSE Rancher Suite allows us to create new workflows in the way we want and not be forced into a box. This change has been so positive that we are now working with other municipalities to help them do the same.”
Why SUSE Rancher Suite?
After assessing containerization platforms from a number of leading vendors, Fundaments selected SUSE Rancher Suite. This set of integrated solutions for deploying, managing and securing both enterprise Kubernetes and traditional virtualized environments includes SUSE Rancher Prime, SUSE Virtualization, SUSE Storage, SUSE Security and SUSE Observability. The new environment was deployed to Fundaments’ secure data center, addressing the municipality’s strict requirements around data sovereignty.
“Rolling out Kubernetes clusters is not inherently complicated,” says Verschuren-Parchomov. “The real challenge is managing and protecting those clusters at speed, scale and in compliance with stringent data protection regulations. That’s why SUSE Rancher Suite is so valuable. SUSE offers the full ecosystem of solutions we need to deliver on digital sovereignty requirements for Eindhoven and other Dutch municipalities.”
Within just two weeks, Fundaments used SUSE Rancher Suite to deliver a proof-of-concept environment to Eindhoven. Five months later, Fundaments successfully launched the new environment, named Container Platform as a Service (CPaaS), into production.
Sander de Rijk, Cloud Consultant at the municipality of Eindhoven, says: "Fundaments delivered a Haven-compliant Kubernetes cluster in our sovereign cloud with SUSE Rancher Suite. They offered us stability, reliability and data sovereignty — all delivered in a timely manner."
The impact of SUSE Rancher Suite
Unlocks flexibility to deliver better services to citizens
For the municipality of Eindhoven, a key benefit of the new CPaaS offering built on SUSE Rancher Suite is its flexibility. By using SUSE Rancher Suite to manage and orchestrate its container platform, employees have much more freedom to pursue new workflows, staying agile and efficient as they work to make life easier for residents.
“SUSE Rancher Suite allows us to create new workflows in the way we want and not be forced into a box,” explains de Rijk. “This change has been so positive that we are now working with other municipalities to help them do the same.”
Frees developers from low-level tasks for 6X faster time to market
By building its new Kubernetes platform on SUSE Rancher Suite, Fundaments cut Eindhoven’s time to market for new containerized services from six months to one or two months — an up to sixfold improvement. SUSE Rancher Prime, paired with SUSE Virtualization, enable developers to avoid low-level Kubernetes management tasks, freeing them to focus on building innovative microservices solutions.
“Developers at Eindhoven don’t need to get bogged down in resource allocation or security configurations,” says Boscu. “Our CPaaS offering, powered by SUSE Rancher Suite, gives the developers a stable, fully managed platform to roll out their new apps.”
Enables 3X faster development
The municipality of Eindhoven will soon start replatforming existing business processes to SUSE Virtualization and SUSE Rancher Prime, which have now been validated as a reference implementation for Haven by VNG.
With around 20 Docker instances running so far, the new environment is already delivering substantial improvements in development agility and efficiency. In the previous virtualization-only environment, it took DevOps teams at Eindhoven up to three months to deploy feature requests. Using the microservices approach supported by SUSE Rancher Suite, developers can complete development, acceptance testing and deployment up to three times faster.
Provides end-to-end security
For Eindhoven and Fundaments, the advantages of choosing a full-stack offering are clear. SUSE Rancher Suite includes all the solutions required to manage and protect containerized workloads throughout the development lifecycle.
“To meet strict security requirements for public administrations in the Netherlands, we need to be able to test for vulnerabilities in the application layer as well as on the Kubernetes cluster itself,” says Verschuren-Parchomov. “SUSE Security is a Kubernetes-native platform that allows us to deliver end-to-end vulnerability management for Eindhoven. Similarly, SUSE Observability gives us a real-time view of the environment, which helps us to maintain high levels of performance and reliability.”
Streamlines IT modernization efforts
By switching from the previous virtualization platform to SUSE Virtualization, Fundaments benefits from a cost-effective, flexible platform that helps streamline the infrastructure modernization process. As Eindhoven continues the process of replatforming its processes, SUSE Virtualization unifies the virtualized and containerized workloads through its integration with SUSE Rancher Prime, creating a single pane of glass for managing the whole complex infrastructure.
Offers responsive, round-the-clock support
Crucially, Eindhoven’s CPaaS is backed by responsive technical support. Fundaments acts as the first-line support provider to Eindhoven, helping the organization to address issues rapidly. And for more complex issues, Fundaments can call on 24/7 support from SUSE experts.
What's next for the municipality of Eindhoven?
By adopting CPaaS, Eindhoven has gained a secure microservices-based architecture to help it accelerate its digital transformation. Partnering with Fundaments and adopting SUSE Rancher Suite helps the municipality ensure that all its data stays securely within the borders of the Netherlands in compliance with the Haven standard.
Looking to the future, Eindhoven is in a strong position to continue modernizing its digital offerings, enabling it to provide more efficient and reliable public services to residents across the municipality.