Business Overview
ilionx is a European managed‑IT services provider with around 1,200 staff across multiple locations. The company specialize in application hosting and security, supporting a growing portfolio of containerized customer workloads running on Docker-in-VM and Kubernetes platforms.
Challenges
ilionx's hosting team launched a Kubernetes-based container platform but soon encountered limitations:
- Initial platform built on Rancher proved too complex to manage effectively
- Operations team became a bottleneck, manually rebottling and rebooting 70–80 customer applications daily
- Customers lacked autonomy as they couldn’t manage or restart their own containers
- High support burden prevented focus on more valuable consulting and modernization efforts
“We tried making Rancher work, but we found it was too complex. We needed to find something simpler that we could run with quickly without having to go up a steep learning curve.”
Solution
ilionx implemented Portainer Business Edition, enabling secure, self-service container management:
- Simple onboarding through Portainer’s “Take 3” trial, followed by seamless expansion to full deployment
- Each customer granted isolated access to manage their own containers via namespaces and RBAC
- Streamlined support as customers can now reboot and manage containers themselves, freeing up hosting engineers
- Access to Portainer support ensured smooth environment operation and quick resolution of any hiccups
"Portainer is crucial to our ability to sell our solution as zero downtime and it removes the complexity for our customers.”
“We barely have downtime....we had one incident of 2 hours in a total of two and a half years.”
“You do not need to have CKA level knowledge of Kubernetes to see how your application is doing within Portainer and to understand what is going on.”
Results
Key results:
- Customers gained independence, with no need to wait for hosting team support
- Support load dropped significantly, allowing engineers to focus on innovation
- Platform became a scalable, customer-centric service, with improved governance and stability
By shifting to Portainer, ilionx transformed from managing containers on behalf of customers to empowering customers to manage their own. This strategic pivot elevated customer satisfaction, boosted operational efficiency, and positioned the platform for ongoing growth.