Transforming legacy infrastructure to modern containerized apps
Open Signal, Portland, Oregon, US
Key metrics
Business overview
Business Focus
Media arts center in Portland, Oregon, dedicated to fostering the transformative power of community media to promote social justice and equity.Based in United States
Key Need For Portainer
Need for a solution to deal with the challenges of their aging infrastructure and outdated technologies.Container Platform
Docker
Background
Open Signal is a media arts center in Portland, Oregon, dedicated to fostering the transformative power of community media to promote social justice and equity. It offers resources such as production studios, equipment rentals, and a variety of classes and events to support local creators. Through its community-focused initiatives, Open Signal provides platforms for diverse voices and stories, aiming to empower individuals and groups by enhancing their media production skills and facilitating the broadcast of their work on cable TV and other media channels.
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, Open Signal emphasizes accessibility and inclusivity, offering memberships and professional services to support a broad spectrum of media projects. The center’s shift to an appointment-based model ensures personalized support for community members. Additionally, Open Signal hosts events and provides opportunities for collaboration and learning, reinforcing its commitment to nurturing a vibrant and diverse media landscape in Portland.
Key challenges
"We had been running on 10-year-old PHP-based web pages. Deployment workflows took 2 hours to fully deploy.”
Addressing the Challenge
Legacy Infrastructure and Outdated Technologies
Open Signal was grappling with the challenges posed by its aging infrastructure and outdated technologies. Jim Bruce, the Director of Technology, explained:
“We had been running on 10-year-old PHP-based web pages."
The organization found itself trailing behind in embracing modern software development practices, which hindered their ability to deliver cutting-edge services and experiences.
Inefficient Deployment and Testing Processes
The team at Open Signal faced significant hurdles when it came to deploying and testing their applications, particularly those with complex dependencies or legacy codebases.
“...deployment workflows took 2 hours to fully deploy.”
The manual processes involved were not only time- consuming but also error-prone, impeding the organization’s overall productivity.
Lack of Containerization Expertise
While Open Signal recognized the potential benefits of containerization, they lacked the necessary expertise to navigate the complexities involved. With a small team and limited resources, acquiring the specialized skills required for containerization was a challenge.
Scalability and Resource Constraints
As a non-profit organization, Open Signal faced budgetary constraints that limited their ability to invest in expensive hardware and infrastructure. Jim acknowledged;
"We can’t afford it because cloud is very operation expensive.”
Additionally, their resource-intensive video workloads demanded robust and scalable solutions, further compounding their challenges.
The Solution
Embracing Containerization with Portainer
Portainer proved to be the catalyst that enabled Open Signal to embrace containerization effectively. By providing a user-friendly interface for managing containerized workloads, Portainer empowered the team to navigate the complexities of containerization. Jim praised the impact, stating;
“The really nice thing, was once we got it working correctly in Docker with just straight up Docker compose, copy, drop the file in, drop in the environment variables, hit run and then Portainer, just worked. That’s a beautiful, rare thing with what I’ve been dealing with a lot lately, especially with legacy systems."
Streamlining Deployments and Testing
Portainer’s intuitive interface and seamless integration with existing workflows allowed Open Signal to streamline their deployment and testing processes significantly.
"We’ve been able to tie them into our CI/CD because Portainer was able to surface what we needed to make the continuous deployment work.”
The ability to deploy applications with just a few clicks and monitor their progress in real-time revolutionized their approach.
Simplifying Containerization for Non-Technical Users
Portainer’s user-friendly interface proved invaluable for Open Signal’s non-technical team members.
“I can point, I can show somebody who’s never used a containerized infrastructure, where to find the logs.”
This accessibility empowered the entire team to leverage the benefits of containerization without requiring extensive technical expertise.
Enabling Scalability and Efficient Resource Utilization
Portainer’s support for GPU workloads and hardware utilization opened up new possibilities for Open Signal. Jim Bruce expressed his excitement,
“The fact that it detects whether the environment has a GPU and then you can actually configure usage of the GPU within Portainer, that’s amazing.”
By efficiently utilizing their existing hardware resources, Open Signal could scale their operations without incurring significant additional costs.
"Within a week of having Portainer, we’ve been able to take deployment workflows from 2 hours to fully deploy, to 5 minutes.”
Results
Portainer’s transformative impact on Open Signal was evident in the metrics and quotes shared by Jim Bruce:
"Considering we’re building things that we never would have built, I would say Portainer will help us grow revenue at least 100%.”
"We’ve had a rapid increase in our productivity because we’ve been able to tie workflows into our CI/CD. Portainer was able to surface what we needed to see to make the continuous deployment work."
"Going from all sorts of manual things to here, just run this, don’t even bother cloning the repository. Portainer’s going to handle all that and it’ll just deploy everything that it needs to deploy.” (Streamlined deployment process.)
By embracing Portainer, Open Signal successfully navigated the challenges posed by their legacy infrastructure, streamlined their processes, and unlocked new possibilities for growth and innovation. The organization’s transformation serves as a testament to the power of containerization and the crucial role Portainer played in making it accessible and achievable.
Metrics
- 240x deployment time improvement (2 hours to 30 seconds).
- 100% revenue growth building things they couldn’t with prior systems.
- Reduced operational costs by minimizing reliance on expensive cloud services.
- Enabled modern software development practices and languages (JavaScript, React).
