The Highlights

• Allowed ViaSat to meet standards for automated failover.
• Helped with Kubernetes cluster management for core ops.
• Leveraged transparent, open source GUI to ensure deployment collaboration.

The Customer

As a major satellite communications provider for the U.S. military, along with other public sector and private sector clients, Viasat allows U.S. warfighters to communicate and share data remotely, which gives a new meaning to the term mission critical services.

Behind the scenes, ViaSat systems analysts support all of the application and back office work that maintain systems and services. They need to ensure they have the tools and processes to manage the complexity of Kubernetes containerization.

The Challenge

As ViaSat moved toward containers, teams faced the challenges of fragile apps and dependencies that stood in the way of legacy migration. The use of Kubernetes offered its own barriers as well since some types of container management requires considerable resources in terms of training.

ViaSat also sought automated failover to prevent data loss and other problems in unanticipated emergency situations. In trying to figure out how to monitor containers, internal engineers realized they were looking for a choice that accommodated runnable packages and containerized apps on a customized basis while providing a single pane of glass management interface.

“The core value I see from Rancher are the things that it provides above and beyond Kubernetes.”

David Burge, Linux Systems Engineer

The Results

ViaSat chose Rancher to improve Kubernetes management in the pursuit of core operational capabilities. Through the Rancher container stack, ViaSat delivered secure, high-speed IP communications and situational awareness to defense customers through ground-breaking fast Internet services from space. The company was able to create “runnable packages” that changed how resources were updated and deployed. Smaller applications that don’t use a lot of memory or CPU could run inside of these new models to battle problems like VM sprawl.

In addition, Rancher helped ViaSat engineers monitor and manage container clusters. By developing a mid-range server model, the solution that ViaSat built avoids problems associated with competing workloads, partially by decentralizing on a container model.

“Working with Rancher has been great. I’m certain that we would not be where we are with Kubernetes had we not found Rancher.”

David Burge, Linux Systems Engineer