A Kubernetes Management Platform for this Energy company
Portainer provides this Energy Company with a Kubernetes Management Platform and Managed Platform Services.
Key metrics
Business overview
Business Focus
This prominent energy company has carved out a significant position in the North American market with an emphasis on advanced technologies and innovation.
Based in the United States
Key Need For Portainer
A container management platform that could replace the internal Kubernetes platform the team had been building.Container Platform
Docker Swarm and KubernetesIntroduction
Company operations span multiple high-yield basins across the continent, where they’ve consistently demonstrated their ability to thrive, even during periods of market volatility. The company’s success stems from its adept use of advanced technologies and strategic resource management.
At the core of their business model is a strong emphasis on innovation and operational excellence. By continually refining their extraction methods and embracing state-of-the-art technologies, they’ve managed to boost production efficiency while simultaneously reducing operational costs.
This approach has not only enhanced their financial performance but also positioned them as a pioneer in their field
Critical business issues
"We originally started with Portainer because people wanted something to have a quick glimpse of what’s going on."
The Objectives
1. Eliminate internal Kubernetes management platform
"We had five developers working on an internal Kubernetes platform for roughly 2 years. They were building in-house applications to provide a UI and all of that.”
Portainer replaced the need for this platform.
This represents a significant cost saving, as two years of work from 5 developers likely cost $1.7 million dollars.
2. Improved accessibility and usability
”We originally started with Portainer because people wanted something to have a quick glimpse of what’s going on.”
This highlights how Portainer provided an easy-to- use interface for monitoring.
“Most devs are not comfortable on the CLI, and it’s much more difficult to look when you scale up to 50, 5 or 10 is fine, but the command line isn’t that great when it comes to managing 50 or more nodes.”
This quote demonstrates how Portainer’s UI became increasingly valuable as they scaled up their container usage.
The interviewee estimated that about 500 people in the organization were exposed to Docker and Portainer, including IS (Information Systems) personnel.
3. Enhanced security and compliance
"I think people are really happy about RBAC. That was the biggest reason why we bought Portainer."
This quote emphasizes the importance of Role-Based Access Control for their organization.
“Now we have the Sox Compliance to adhere to so we need to control what the developer is able to modify, and the other guys to be able to troubleshoot. So that really solved the big issue that we’ve had for such a long time.”
This quote highlights how Portainer’s RBAC features helped with SOX compliance and segregation of duties.
4. Streamlined operations
”Everyone knows now. We put portainer.ourdomain. Everyone’s going to the right one. There’s no confusion.”
This shows how consolidating to a single access point simplified their operations.
"We had 15 to 20 swarm clusters which was less than ideal. Now everyone knows where to go. We put portainer.ourdomain. Everyone’s going to the right one. There’s no confusion."
This shows how consolidating to a single control plane simplified their operations.
The interviewee mentioned they had “15 to 20 swarm clusters” and even more Portainer instances when counting dev environments. Consolidating these into a single point of access was a significant improvement.
5. Increased productivity
While the interviewee couldn't directly confirm this, they acknowledged the potential:
"Yeah, just for the team to look at this image and single pane of view for the network. That’s really helpful.”
"Now we have the Sox compliance to adhere to so we need to control what the developer is able to modify, and the other guys need to be able to troubleshoot. So that really solved the big issue that we’ve had for such a long time."
Managed Services Roadmap
For this large enterprise customer, the scope of managed services is substantial, covering management of up to 500 container host nodes (Docker or Kubernetes) and 100 clusters across multiple production and non-production environments. The services include operational onboarding, 24/7 monitoring and incident response, change management, DevOps assistance, disaster recovery planning, and more. The project aims to maintain high availability for critical applications, with uptime targets ranging from 97% to 99.99% depending on the environment.
The managed services component was set up to leverage specialized expertise in managing complex containerized environments at scale. By outsourcing platform engineering to a dedicated team, the customer can focus on their core business while ensuring their container infrastructure is optimally maintained, secured, and continuously improved. The comprehensive nature of the services - spanning everything from day-to-day operations to strategic planning and automation emphasizes a holistic approach to platform management. The multi-year commitment and substantial scope indicate this
is a strategic partnership aimed at supporting the customer’s long-term digital transformation and application modernization efforts.
Further Metrics
- Company size: 15,000 employees
- 100+ developers in the organization
- $1.7M Developer Savings (5 developers working for 2 years on an in-house solution, replaced by Portainer @ $171k Total comp)
- Potential 15-20% increase in developer productivity
- 15-20 Docker swarm clusters consolidated
- About 500 people exposed to Docker and Portainer in the organization
- 300+ Docker containers managed
- Eventually 300 plus Kubernetes nodes managed
- 99.99% uptime targets for critical managed applications