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Industrial IoT and Edge

Portainer is your solution to securely deploy software containers across your fleet of Edge devices.

Giving customers the power to manage their containers

Customer Story: ilionx

Business overview

Business Focus
A digital services company offering application hosting and security services to mid-sized organisations
Based in the Netherlands
With 1,200 staff across 13 locations.
Key Need For Portainer
To simplify the deployment and management of apps on behalf of customers.
Container Platform
Docker containers running in VMs orchestrated by Kubernetes.
Ilionx_social

The Challenge

ilionx offer virtual machine management services and needed a simple way to deploy and manage apps on behalf of customers. They began their containerization journey in 2020, with Docker containers running in VMs orchestrated by Kubernetes.

Remy Simons, Hosting Team Lead was in charge of the project. For Remy, it was important to find a highly functional solution, as well as a cost effective one. Initially, Remy and the Hosting Team built a platform using Rancher and Kubernetes however, they quickly realised that Rancher was too complex for them. They simply didn’t have the time to learn it.

 

Remy said “We tried making Rancher work, but we found it was too complex. We needed to find something simpler that we could run with quickly without having to go up a steep learning curve.”

 

With 70-80 customer apps running, the team found they were constantly having to help customers reboot and manage their containers. They needed a ‘self-service’ solution that would allow customers to manage their own containers / applications.

The Decision to Choose Portainer

Remy researched “alternatives to Rancher” and discovered Portainer. He signed up for Portainer’s Take 3 program, which gave him the first 3 nodes of Portainer Business Edition for free.

 

Remy said, “Portainer suited us well, it’s not overly complex and we could get Portainer up and running ourselves. We did experience an issue with the environment not going back online after redeployment, so I reached out to the Portainer support team and was able to get this problem resolved quickly.

 

To complete the roll out, ilionx needed more than 3 nodes and Remy was able to complete a purchase for the extra nodes quickly and easily.

The purchase of extra Business Edition nodes gives ilionx access to personal, prioritized support from the Portainer team and Remy felt this was important in case they run into issues or need help improving their processes at any stage.

The Results

Thanks to Portainer, ilionx have been able to give each of their customers a login [to Portainer] that gives them the ability to manage their own apps. Not unexpectedly, customer have limited experience with Kubernetes, however, using Portainer for just a few weeks, customers have quickly adapted to the technology.

 

Remy said, “Giving our customers the ability to login and check and reboot containers themselves has been a huge win for us. We love helping our customers and we want to spend time working with them on other more complex tasks that provide them more value, rather than jobs like rebooting containers.”

 

Portainer has helped ilionx deliver an improved, self-service platform to their customers, while reducing load on their own team. By giving the customers the power to solve smaller issues themselves, the time now spent with customers is more effective.

Improved customer experience and improved team experience, it is a win-win for ilionx.

 ilionx’s recent onboarding session with Portainer allowed them to learn more about Portainer’s functionality and resolve the issues they were having.

Now the initial set up is done, Remy and the team are working on making everything run as smoothly as possible. At Portainer, we are very much looking forward to working with ilionx over the coming years.

"Giving customers the ability to login and check and reboot containers themselves via Portainer was a huge win for us. We love helping our customers and we want to spend time working with them on other more complex tasks that provide them more value, rather than jobs like rebooting containers."

 

RemySimons
Remy SimonsHosting Team Lead

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