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Case Study: Kubernetes-Native Infrastructure management with CORT Furniture
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Process Control & Optimization
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Cort, a global leader in furniture rental and related services, standardized on the use of Kubernetes for important workloads such as Magento for e-commerce and BitBucket for their code repositories as well as MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and other databases. They wanted to fully leverage and preserve benefits such as separation of concerns between applications and infrastructure, quick and consistent instantiation of environments, and enhanced operational efficiency benefits typically gained from using Kubernetes for compute. However, they found that despite extremely vocal support of ‘Cloud Native’ and Kubernetes, e.g., Container Storage Interface (CSI) adoption, all considered vendors were actually not Kubernetes native. They operated and behaved entirely differently than Kubernetes itself, increasing the complexity of the environment while creating a shared dependency for all stateful workloads. Additionally, to simplify operations and improve the resilience of their environments, including backing up and enabling disaster recovery across two domestic data centers, Cort wanted to have an easy to use application to centralize their management of Kubernetes as a data infrastructure management layer.
About The Customer
Cort is a Berkshire Hathaway company and a global leader in furniture rental and related services. The company has over 2,500 employees and has standardized on the use of Kubernetes for important workloads such as Magento for e-commerce and BitBucket for their code repositories as well as MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and other databases. The company is interested in fully leveraging and preserving benefits such as separation of concerns between applications and infrastructure, quick and consistent instantiation of environments, and enhanced operational efficiency benefits typically gained from using Kubernetes for compute. Cort is also interested in using a solution that combines an open source foundation with an easy to use UX including visual management of per workload back-up and recovery.
The Solution
Cort made a conscious decision to truly maximize its significant Kubernetes investment by selecting the OpenEBS Enterprise Platform as their common layer, within Kubernetes, for the management of their data infrastructure. Aside from a rich set of features, the popularity of OpenEBS as a CNCF open source project with a vibrant community was one of the key reasons for the selection of OpenEBS. The OpenEBS system can automatically deploy and configure OpenEBS itself, including the pooling of underlying drives and the registration of OpenEBS within Kubernetes. This has eliminated the need for hours of manual work had other storage systems been relied upon - and also reduces the risk of human error. As the deployment grows, Cort is starting to use MayaData’s OpenEBS Enterprise Platform for optimization as well as deployment and operations tasks.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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