Achieving Major Efficiencies through Migration from OpenShift to Rancher

“It’s more efficient for us to run a Kubernetes cluster with managed Kubernetes than in OpenShift. OpenShift has so many processes and additional tooling that add complexity. In managed Kubernetes, I just click an API and that’s it. Overall, running in Rancher equates to half the effort – and cost.” Michael Schmid, Head of Technology, amazee.io

Sometimes technology partnerships are greater than the sum of their parts. That’s the case with two Swiss companies who have come together to deliver Kubernetes solutions to their customers. VSHN is Switzerland’s leading 24/7 cloud operations partner and first Kubernetes Certified Service Provider. amazee.io is an open source container hosting provider that offers flexible solutions built for speed, security and scalability. The partnership combines VSHN’s knowledge of managing servers, infrastructure and upgrades with amazee.io’s knowledge of running applications like Drupal, WordPress and Laravel. The companies partner on Lagoon, amazee.io’s container-based web hosting platform, which VSHN maintains and scales.

Customers Are Moving from OpenShift to Rancher

VSHN has been working with Kubernetes since 2016. OpenShift has been a part of VSHN’s offering for some time – Rancher has been added recently, to round out the portfolio. VSHN CTO Aarno Aukia has seen an increase in customers moving away from OpenShift to Rancher, for several reasons: cost savings, the need for a centralized management environment and multi-cloud support.

When the two companies started working together in 2015, they built amazee.io’s platform with legacy tools. But as Kubernetes began to proliferate and a cloud management tools emerged, they wanted the flexibility to work in a variety of environments. However, having separate management strategies didn’t make sense. OpenShift lacked multi-cloud support, so the partners turned to Rancher for its heterogeneous approach. 100 percent open source and platform agnostic, Rancher allows them to use any mix of technologies, tools and services whether in the cloud, on-premise or at the network edge.

Today, amazee.io runs clusters in multiple datacenters using Rancher, with dedicated clusters for individual customers and 24/7 support. With Rancher, amazee.io has gained significant efficiencies in moving from OpenShift to Rancher – both in terms of cost and management burden. They’ve reduced cluster deployment time and management time by 80 percent, while cutting costs by 50 percent. They are now migrating OpenShift clusters to Rancher. These range from small two or three node clusters to larger 20 to 30 node clusters. With Rancher, amazee.io has gained the flexibility to scale.

Read our case study to hear more about VSHN and amazee.io’s transition from OpenShift to Rancher and how doing so has freed them up to focus on innovation.