Mirantis

Volkswagen Group, the world’s second largest automaker, was facing a challenge with its IT environment which had become decentralized and heterogonous due to its recent growth. Brands, divisions, and advanced initiatives operate on different IT platforms which requires costly investment in hundreds of technologies and development tools. The company's heterogeneous IT platforms included specialized hardware, often with long procurement cycles, and required significant manual work to provision new resources. Furthermore, expensive storage solutions were being consumed by applications that doubled in their capacity requirements every two years. The company needed to unify and automate work streams and platforms across the entire Volkswagen Group. New standardized infrastructure would need to replace existing developer systems yet still connect to legacy applications that maintain important data.

The operator, a leading telecommunications company based in Japan, was looking to offer Kubernetes to enterprise customers interested in running cloud-native applications. They wanted to deploy Kubernetes as part of a hybrid environment that would give clients the flexibility of accessing VMs, containers or baremetal instances as needed. The operator was also interested in creating internal business applications with microservices and needed to provide containers to internal development teams. One of the benefits they saw in Kubernetes was the ability to reduce hypervisor overhead by running containers on baremetal. The operator was using legacy VMware based virtualization infrastructure, which required not only significant hypervisor resources, but also a lot of effort to operate and troubleshoot, not to mention downtime from periodic version upgrades.

The Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE), China's second-largest exchange, was experiencing rapid growth, processing millions of trades each day for its 1700 listed companies. However, the existing IT systems were not meeting the computational needs of fund managers. Traditional client-server technology began to fall short of performance requirements and lacked the flexibility to accommodate fast-moving industry developments. To thrive, fund managers needed new systems that were scalable, centralized, and not locked into specific vendors or architectures. The new systems also needed to be high-performing, elastic, open, and secure to meet the stringent regulations of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC).