Portainer simplifies container management for this infrastructure team
Global Automotive Manufacturer
Business Overview
Business Focus
Automotive manufacturer.Based in United States
Global automative manufacturer with 45,000 employees and revenue exceeding $20 billion.Business Case
To simplify container management and provide an easy-to-use interface for their infrastructure team.Container Platforms
Docker and Swarm
Business overview
This large automotive manufacturer was founded in the 1950s. It has grown from producing small vehicles to now offering a range of sedans, hatchbacks, wagons, and SUVs. The company employs over 45,000 people worldwide.
It has major manufacturing facilities in Japan, the United States, and other countries. The company’s global sales revenue reached approximately $20 billion.
It has a strong presence in North America, comprising over half of the company’s total vehicle sales. The automaker sells over 1 million vehicles annually across nearly 100 countries. It has a decades-long history and an emphasis on safety, reliability, and all-wheel drive technologies across most of its model lineup. The company maintains a steady market share in many countries with its adventure-oriented branding and array of practical vehicles at competitive price points.
Addressing the challenge
This automotive manufacturer implemented Portainer to help manage and deploy containers across their enterprise infrastructure. The primary drivers for adopting Portainer were to simplify container management and provide an easy-to-use interface for their infrastructure team.
“Portainer gave people that are not very familiar with CLI, SSH, or Putty to have an interface and easily manage and spin up containers as needed”, explained the Automotive Group Leader.
Currently, there is a small infrastructure team of 4 people that are the primary users and administrators of Portainer while 40 developers will drive containerization beyond internal infrastructure applications and services.
Some infrastructure examples include:
- Nginx web servers running as proxies, replacing their legacy IIS web servers
- An SFTP server for secure file transfers.
By containerizing these services, this auto manufacturer has realized several benefits:
- Simplified deployment - With templates and automation through tools like Terraform, Ansible and Azure DevOps, deploying new containers takes minutes compared to hours or days previously.
- Easier management - The visual interface of Portainer allows the team to manage and monitor containers without needing deep technical expertise.
- Improved resource utilization - Containers allow them to reduce the resource footprint compared to full virtual machines.
- Built-in redundancy - If a container or host fails, they can easily restart containers or migrate them to another host.
Looking ahead, this automotive manufacturer plans to expand their use of containers into production applications. Their software development team of around 40 developers is starting to adopt containers for some of their Java applications.
To support this, the rich access control and role- based access control (RBAC) capabilities will be critical.
“And then in terms of productivity, the biggest thing has been the simplification of deploying stacks in containers.”
This will allow them to delegate container management abilities to different roles like developers, operations and help desk, without worrying about accidentally impacting production systems. This provides a key value because enabling secure delegation of container management, reduces risk of accidental human errors, and builds trust in containers for business-critical systems.
“There’s a good opportunity for improved resource utilization by only utilizing container resources, rather than fully bloated Windows servers running as the base for our JBOSS applications.”
The results
Overall, Portainer has streamlined container deployment and management processes. They anticipate developers to be 10% more productive as they roll out containers more broadly across business applications.
Portainer provides a simple interface for less technical users to manage containers without deep command line or Docker expertise. The access control capabilities will be critical for safely expanding use of containers across their development teams.
“Portainer allow us to make sure they can’t tear down an entire app by accident. They can go in there and upload their config files, restart their containers, but that’s giving them the ability to only do those things,” Systems Administrator.
Key achievements
'Not only can all of our technical and not so technical people setup operations using Portainer, but the role based access control provides complete security and governance over all access with full audit trails for visibility and monitoring.”
"Giving our non-technical support team, who do not know or understand command line, the ability to monitor, restart and triage container problems is super beneficial for us, particularly because we run 3 shifts 24x7x365. We couldn’t do it without Portainer."
"And then in terms of productivity, the biggest thing has been the simplification of deploying stacks in containers.”
"Portainer gave people that are not very familiar with CLI, SSH, or Putty to have an interface and easily manage and spin up containers as needed."
"It allows us to make sure they can’t tear down an entire app by accident. They can go in there and upload their config files, restart their containers, but that’s giving them the ability to only do those things,”
"There’s a good opportunity for improved resource utilization by only utilizing container resources, rather than fully bloated Windows servers running as the base for our JBOSS applications.”
