Learn how VSHN reduced their Kubernetes support burden with Cilium
Kubernetes-first Strategy
VSHN is Switzerland’s leading partner for DevOps, Container & Kubernetes. VSHN was built to shake up the hosting industry in Switzerland and has quickly become a leading ICT company in the region, earning a Digital Economy Award in 2019 and many more awards and certifications.
One of its most popular offerings is the APPUiO series of products.
Co-launched with the IT consulting company Puzzle ITC, APPUiO provides users with a turnkey Kubernetes cluster, based on Red Hat OpenShift. It is available in several versions: APPUiO Managed (for customers who want a cluster but don't want to run it), APPUiO Self-Managed (for customers who want a turnkey OpenShift cluster but want to eventually operate it) and the most recent offering: APPUiO Cloud, a “Namespace-as-a-Service” offering (based on Red Hat OpenShift 4) where customers can deploy their containers in minute.
Kubernetes is the present and our future.
The Requirements: Multi-Tenant Network Observability and Mission-Critical Support
Red Hat OpenShift is one of the most popular Enterprise Kubernetes platforms and has been widely adopted. While its default networking model provides excellent functionality, VSHN - and their customers - required deeper insight into the network and security behaviour of their applications.
This became evident as APPUiO's quick adoption and success caused the burden on the VSHN support team to increase significantly. Whenever customers experienced connectivity issues, they would open support tickets and ask the VSHN support team to run ping/traceroute on their behalf or troubleshoot network policies.
There was a clear need to provide an intuitive user interface to each customer, where they could visualize connectivity, down to the API request.
Another way to relieve the VSHN support team was to get additional help when needed: VSHN have a strong knowledge of Cilium - learned by experimenting or doing the Isovalent labs - but, as they were running critical services on behalf of their customers, they wanted to have the peace of mind and the option to call on to experts, if the help was ever needed.
Cilium is the backbone.
After all, as Tobias Brunner (VSHN's CTO) said, "If Cilium doesn’t work, there’s no network connectivity and no network connectivity means no workloads."
VSHN selects Isovalent Cilium Enterprise for its managed Kubernetes offering
VSHN chose Isovalent Cilium Enterprise as the networking backbone supporting VSHN's Kubernetes-based offering APPUiO Cloud. The self-service capabilities enabled customers to troubleshoot on their own with a user-friendly UI. And the enterprise support relieved the VSHN team when needed.
Additionally, VHSN benefits from a wealth of features out of the box, including:
- Highly scalable IPv4 and IPv6 Kubernetes CNI
- Kubernetes Label & CIDR Network Policies
- DNS-aware Network Policies
- Host Network Policies
- Deny Network Policies
- L7-Aware Network Policy & Visibility
- TLS-termination for L7 Visibility
- Hubble Cluster-wide Flow Visibility CLI / API
- Hubble Service Map + Flow Visibility UI
- Identity-aware Network Metrics (Prometheus)
- HTTP/gRPC-aware Connectivity Metrics
Self-service Network Observability portal
By leveraging Hubble, VSHN's customers can now have direct data insight into their application service connectivity.
It relieved VSHN from mundane troubleshooting tasks and freed them up to innovate on newer features.
Users can see how OpenShift workloads communicate with one another, including traffic details between the pods displayed in the service graph or available in the CLI. Additionally, Cilium collects extensive metrics for developers to monitor TCP, UDP and HTTP golden signals like HTTP return codes, latency, requests per second, and used TLS ciphers.
Outcomes
For VSHN, a reduced operational burden. For its customers, self-service insight and observability. For all: peace of mind, with support provided by the creators of Cilium.
Lower support burden
Multi-tenant Service Mapping
Support from the creators of Cilium
High Performance CNIMission-Critical Workloads Require Utmost Expertise
VSHN has numerous clients in the FinTech, Health and eCommerce industries, where mission-critical workloads and regulatory requirements demand high service levels.
It was one of the factors behind VSHN's solution to select Isovalent Cilium Enterprise: support provided by the creators of Cilium.
Isovalent Cilium Enterprise comes with the following support and service benefits.
Enterprise-hardened Cilium Versions and Testing
24x7 Enterprise Grade Support SLA
Proactive Support Environment Reviews
Cilium + Hubble Technical Training
Dedicated Solutions Architect
Directed Development / Custom Integrations
VSHN Deployment Scale
Isovalent Cilium Enterprise
1,500
Cores
Current Scale
5,000+
Cores
Future Scale
What’s Next?
How to learn more about Isovalent, Cilium and eBPF