Effectively running Kubernetes in production at scale can be a huge challenge for today’s organizations. Few companies have the right platform, experience, and skills to get there themselves. Cyso sought to change that by providing managed internet services, platforms, and infrastructure for the Dutch business market.

Before partnering with D2iQ, Cyso was building DIY Kubernetes in-house using free and available tooling to install and maintain their infrastructure. Although they were able to set up Kubernetes, they were unable to deliver production-grade and upgradable Kubernetes in a uniform fashion on their own private cloud, as well as in the public cloud for their customers. 

“We strongly believe in an “any cloud” strategy. We have our own private cloud running on VMware and public cloud running in Google, but they have their own flavors,” explained Tjebbe de Winter, Managing Director at Cyso. “If a customer has invested time into an AWS set up, it’s going to be difficult to set up and migrate to a different cloud. Instead of trying to create a perfect Kubernetes platform, we needed to find a software vendor that could create a platform-as-a-service offering so we can deliver Kubernetes to our customers to solve for Day 2 operational challenges.”

In addition, the gaps in cloud provider capabilities made it difficult to create a stack that could be updated and maintained without impacting the availability of the customer and the productivity of their engineers. 

“You want more than an empty Kubernetes stack, but that’s what you get in a lot of public clouds,” said Winter. “If a Kubernetes version changes, it can impact our customers and keep our engineers from what they need to do. We needed an easy way to install updates that are supported and well documented what will change.”

Faster and Scalable Kubernetes Deployments
Due to his familiarity with DC/OS, de Winter turned his sights to D2iQ Konvoy. Moreover, he was swayed by the opinionated set of services and flexibility of the platform.

“We felt that if the people from Mesosphere created Konvoy after creating DC/OS, it’s probably something good,” said Winter.

“If you have to maintain and operate multiple technologies to do monitoring, it’s better to do it with one,” he added. “Because D2iQ Konvoy comes with a dashboard that enables all of these services on any cloud platform, it really helps our customers focus on the applications they want to develop. It’s all of these standard features in the Konvoy offering that gives our customers a head start with Kubernetes and helps them simplify their choices and move forward quickly.”

During the implementation process, Winter was impressed by the way D2iQ guided Cyso. “Their support team was easy to reach and was there for quick responses over Slack where we did our work every day. “If there was an issue, they were very knowledgeable and could easily fix it.”

D2iQ has given Cyso the opportunity to put in place repeatable automated processes. As a result, Cyso has seen a 50% reduction in time involved in standing up production-ready Kubernetes deployments. Now they can spend less time on daily maintenance and more time delivering business value. “With D2iQ Konvoy, it takes less than an hour to deploy production-grade Kubernetes,” Winter explained. “Instead of taking eight hours to update a cluster, we now spend less than an hour. Our engineers no longer have to fight with Kubernetes to get updated and can do other things with their time. Having a production-ready platform like D2iQ Konvoy makes us ten times more efficient.”

At the same time, D2iQ positions Cyso to further innovate. “D2iQ has given us the opportunity to grow into our enterprise Kubernetes offering. With the features that are in D2iQ Kommander, our customers are able to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters and move workloads between those clusters and work with different project teams.”