Streamlining infrastructure management with Portainer

The Health Science Core Facilities at the University of Utah uses Portainer to help manage the infrastructure for over 35 research facilities across campus. With only two IT staff supporting millions in revenue, Portainer has been invaluable in allowing them to easily deploy and manage the various applications needed by researchers.

The university has found success using Portainer to streamline application deployment and management across a large environment with very limited IT staff. The main product is a resource scheduling and management system, but they are no longer constrained by the arduous process of testing and standing up new applications. Elliot was directly accessing and managing servers one-off before Portainer streamlined the infrastructure oversight. Portainer is now being used to manage 38 stacks.

“Portainer is responsible for dropping my workload between 15 and 20% because I’m not going out and touching individual servers.”

The university is investing heavily to scale up their research computing infrastructure. They recently purchased $25,000 worth of new servers to support expansion, with Portainer helping to manage the new capacity. Some key ways Portainer will assist with growth:

• Streamlined application deployment: Compose file support makes standing up new containers a breeze. Apps that don’t containerize well are being deprecated.
• GitOps automation: Plans are underway to implement CI/CD pipelines. Portainer’s tight GitHub integration will allow infrastructure-as-code and automatic deployments.
• Orchestration: As the number of servers and containers increases, Docker Swarm will help with high availability and redundancy. Portainer makes it easy to visualize Swarm clusters.

“Especially with the amount of support that we’ve seen for the containerizing of applications over the last five years... Portainer just makes it that much easier to go from ‘This is a cool piece of tech’ to ‘we can really use this’."

Overcoming Server Failures and Data Loss

A key challenge for the infrastructure team has been recovering from catastrophic server failures and data loss. Recently, they experienced a server fire that took systems offline for 36 hours. Portainer has helped improve disaster recovery in a few ways:

• Easy container restore: With all application stack details captured in Portainer, the team can quickly recreate containers from scratch when servers are rebuilt. This is estimated to reduce downtime by 10- 15 hours.
• Offsite backups: The ability to export the entire Portainer environment configuration allows them to back up settings offsite.

Better Security and Access Controls

As additional facilities start to leverage shared infrastructure, role-based access controls will become more critical. While not currently used extensively, Elliot knows Portainer can support restricted user roles when required.

Additionally, plans are in place to integrate the university’s central authentication system (Duo) for 2-factor authentication. This will improve security and audibility of infrastructure changes.