The Quest for Excellence—and Velocity
In the premium food industry, the quest for excellence never ends—and that has increased pressure on the company’s developers to speed up innovation for a wide range of business applications and interfaces.
The team focuses primarily on custom enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business intelligence applications, such as those for collecting customer metrics, managing retail sales, or tracking transportation. They reached a point, however, where their VMware virtualization stack put a ceiling on their productivity: the process of building, testing and going live with new web services or applications often took the company 90-120 business days.
They needed a way to move faster. With Mirantis Kubernetes Engine, Lens, and professional services support from Mirantis, the team was able to decrease software delivery time to a third of what it took before—all while improving uptime and reducing infrastructure costs.
Accelerating Software Delivery
“Our upper management and senior leadership have very high expectations, and when they want something, they want it delivered as fast as possible,” said the company’s senior DevOps manager. “What came of this internal pressure for faster application delivery were perfect use cases for moving the dev team to Kubernetes.”
The company had roughly 40 applications suitable for containerization, built by a team of 15 developers, who primarily use Java, React, and Spring. “Instead of building our legacy web apps as Java applications running microservices on just a VM, we could actually decrease our footprint and time to delivery by using containers,” the senior DevOps manager added.
The team knew that transitioning to containers and Kubernetes would be challenging, and wanted a vendor that offered world-class support.
“There’s a big learning curve with containers and Kubernetes, so we really wanted enterprise-level support,” the senior DevOps manager said. After surveying leading vendors and completing a Proof Of Concept, the company selected Docker Enterprise (now Mirantis Kubernetes Engine) due to its comprehensive support offering.
Mirantis Kubernetes Engine is an enterprise container platform that features both Swarm and Kubernetes orchestration, and comes with a range of SLAs, including OpsCare 24x7x365 proactive support, which features continuous monitoring and automated alerting to maximize production uptime.
But the support from Mirantis didn’t stop there.