How we built a Container Platform

Applications developed for use in containers offer many advantages in terms of development quality, performance in operation, stability and, of course, time-2-market. The professional environment to deploy Cloud Native applications in-house was then introduced in 2020. SPAR ICS has its own Redhat Openshift container platform based on Google Kubernetes technology. In addition, we now have a test cluster and a production cluster. We are always up to date with the latest developments (patch level) and continuously adapt new concepts from the areas of CI/CD, DevOps and microservice architectures.

Our operating and support partner is Software One with its partner B1 Systems. The partner manages the cluster infrastructure and supports us in the further development of features.

Numerous projects, applications or PoCs have since settled into the new environment with the help of the Openshift Core Team. First and by far the most important are the teams from Business Automation & Integration and Mobile Apps, which are developing cloud-native software in an incredibly progressive way and are thus fully committed to the technologies of the future. In addition, a Container Core team takes care of the complex issues of governance, working techniques, architecture, future visions and is the main point of contact. With concrete, reusable implementations, the Core Team also actively supports the DevOps teams in their projects.

Based on our experience, this is our pro tip:

Resource management is a core topic in all cloud environments. If you are responsible for a Kubernetes environment make sure all projects/namespaces enforce resource quotas. Then all deployments must provide an indication of their typical and maximum resource consumption and adhere to the limits. Go this extra mile, as this guarantees that DevOps teams deliver higher quality applications and your costs stay manageable. We enforced several rules (resources quotas, monitoring, RBAC, etc.) and created work techniques right from the beginning, which was hard to be honest, but helps us now in delivering applications in an pretty organized way.