The Highlights

• Accelerated adoption of Kubernetes container models by simplifying deployments and orienting engineers.
• Managed process consistency in a diverse set of projects.
• Increased production deployment efficiency from days to seconds.

The Customer

Ventee-privee is a French e-commerce sales firm that works with many developers to create flash sales and offer deep discounts to consumers, working with big brand clients. Within the company as a whole, the vpTech department is in charge of making all of the company’s digital systems work.

As the company grows, the ranks of vpTech swelled to around 700 people working on a variety of different unique codebase projects, in many different programming languages. This growth necessitates a deliberate approach to the company’s architecture and how digital operations get done.

The Challenge

At vpTech, a lack of unified and automated processes led to difficulty in horizontally scaling workers. Long waiting times for users was cutting into productivity. There were also specific structural needs: a unified interface to manage the container hosts, a way to deploy across many hosts with a common network layer, and an API for deploying containers in production using CI/CD.

Adding to the list of challenges, vpTech͛s servers were in silos, meaning that the internal processes were opaque to others outside of the server team. There was very little failure detection, and in general, it was hard to alert people to get all-hands on deck in a problem situation.

“Before Rancher, it could take up to 4 days for a production deployment. With Rancher, it’s taken down to minimal time.”

Ludovic Paquet, R & D Research Scientist

The Results

vpTech chose Rancher for user-friendly container management; to cover a diverse architecture with a top layer that made it easy for internal stakeholders to automate and enhance processes.

With Rancher, teams can run continuous integration more frequently and stateless stacks are also easier to stand up. Many of the failure alert problems have also been fixed, and significant automation runs on the developer’s use of a transparent container system.

“Rancher, with its clean and powerful UI, is a great tool for supporting developers in using containers and microservices technology.”

Ludovic Paquet, R & D Research Scientist