Innovative Customer Solutions
Managed IT Services - Europe
Business Overview
Business Focus
Managed IT ServicesBased in the Netherlands
With 1,200 staff across 13 locations.Business Case
The company launched its Kubernetes container platform over two years ago to modernize its hosting infrastructure and support more innovative customer workloads.
Container Platforms
Docker containers running in VMs orchestrated by Kubernetes.
Customer Objectives
Company Background
Ilionx is a leading Dutch provider of managed IT services. The company launched its Kubernetes container platform over two years ago to modernize its hosting infrastructure and support more innovative customer workloads.
The Kubernetes platform started small, hosting mainly internal tools and services across Ilionx’s infrastructure. However, driven by growing customer demand for agile containerized environments, the platform quickly expanded to support production customer workloads. In a 6 month period, Ilionx onboarded 6 external customer applications to Kubernetes across industries ranging from government to e-commerce. Today, the company runs the platform with a small dedicated team leveraging solutions like Portainer to provide self-service capabilities and drive operational efficiency. With accelerating growth as more customers migrate from virtual machines to containers, Ilionx continues to invest in Kubernetes as a core part of its hosting business for the cloud-native era.
Addressing the challenge
Educate new customers on best practices for Kubernetes deployments within Portainer.
By integrating with Kubernetes RBAC policies, Portainer ensured customers could only access their own containers and resources through isolated namespaces.
Deployment visibility, application logging access, redeployment via webhook API, and command line interface.
Quotes from the Team
“They don’t even know that other namespaces exist. They don’t have that visibility and they shouldn’t.”
"Portainer is crucial to our ability to sell our solution as 0 downtime and it removes the complexity for our customers.”
“We barely have downtime....we had one incident of 2 hours on a total of 2 1/2 years.”
“You do not need to have CKA level knowledge of Kubernetes to see how your application is doing within Portainer and to understand what is going on.”
"We are tasked with bringing self-service to customers operating with no knowledge of Kubernetes at all.”
“It’s actually quite easy. We never did it because we thought it would require a lot of Kubernetes knowledge, but it doesn’t.”
Technical Implications
Portainer enabled Ilionx to provide secure, least-privilege access to customers on the container platform.
Operate customer Kubernetes clusters that are secure, auditable, and compliant which is key in their highly regulated industries.
Improved self-service capabilities directly translated to happier customers able to manage their own deployments without constantly relying on Ilionx support tickets.
