The Customer

As the largest railway company in Europe, Deutsche Bahn serves an estimated 2 billion passengers every year. It’s a giant in European travel and logistics and requires innovation and leadership to keep the company agile and performing well in today’s dynamic business environment.

The core responsibility of the company’s PZ Reisendeninformation (Traveler Information) division is to deliver traveler information where it’s needed. This organization develops solutions and processes for a better customer experience and enhanced customer relationship management. PZ Reisendeninformation defines the vision for traveler information and also creates appropriate solutions for all divisions of Deutsche Bahn.

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The Challenge

In order to achieve good scalability as well as a microservices design to help define applications and provide high-availability, Deutsche Bahn wanted to utilize a container setup. However, the learning curve caused some challenges, including getting teams oriented with the know-how and expertise on container orchestration.

Another challenge the team encountered was in the Amazon AWS vendor environment – developers had trouble with security and network restrictions that kept them from building their container model.

The Results

Deutsche Bahn used Rancher to create a container orchestration model that enabled the microservices ecosystem and adequately supported developer teams who had to manage change in an efficient way.

One of the best use cases for Deutsche Bahn was Rancher’s support for project and sub-project teams including scrum teams, a central operations team, and other stakeholders trying to manage Kubernetes clusters.

Easier configuration and rollout made container orchestration a part of Deutsche Bahn’s overall business processes. It enabled the company to bring people on board more quickly and allowed them to work effectively toward the scalability and availability that Deutsche Bahn’s applications needed.