Open Signal
Transforming Legacy Infrastructure into Modern, Containerized Apps
Business overview
Open Signal is a nonprofit media arts center based in Portland, Oregon, dedicated to empowering communities through media production, storytelling, and broadcasting. As a 501(c)(3) organization, it provides production studios, equipment rentals, educational programs, and broadcast opportunities to amplify diverse voices and promote social justice and equity. Behind the scenes, Open Signal operates a range of digital services and video production workflows that support both internal operations and community creators. However, much of its core infrastructure had been built years earlier and was increasingly difficult to maintain. With aging PHP-based web systems and limited resources typical of a nonprofit organization, Open Signal needed a cost-effective way to modernize its infrastructure, streamline deployments, and support new innovation without dramatically increasing operational spend.
"Within a week of having Portainer, we’ve been able to take deployment workflows from 2 hours to fully deploy, to 5 minutes."
Challenge
1. Legacy Infrastructure and Outdated Technologies
Open Signal was running on 10-year-old PHP-based web pages and legacy systems that limited innovation. Modern development practices were difficult to adopt, slowing the organization’s ability to launch new services.
2. Slow and Manual Deployment Processes
Deployment workflows were highly manual and time-consuming. Fully deploying applications could take up to two hours, creating bottlenecks in testing and production releases. These manual steps were also error-prone and difficult to scale.
3. Limited Containerization Expertise
Although the team recognized the potential of containerization, they lacked deep expertise in managing container infrastructure. As a small technology team within a nonprofit, acquiring specialized skills was challenging.
4. Budget and Scalability Constraints
Cloud services were considered too expensive for their operational model. At the same time, their video production workloads required scalable infrastructure, including GPU support. They needed a solution that maximized existing hardware rather than increasing spend.
Solution
Open Signal adopted Portainer to simplify container management and modernize its hybrid infrastructure without adding operational complexity.
Rapid Container Adoption
Portainer provided a clean, intuitive interface layered on top of Docker Compose, allowing the team to copy configurations, define environment variables, and deploy workloads with ease. This dramatically lowered the barrier to entry for containerization and enabled modernization without a steep learning curve.
CI/CD Integration and Streamlined Deployments
Portainer integrated seamlessly into Open Signal’s CI/CD pipeline, surfacing the necessary controls to automate continuous deployment. What once took two hours to deploy was reduced to minutes—and in some cases, seconds.
Within one week of implementing Portainer, deployment workflows were reduced from hours to just five minutes, representing a dramatic improvement in operational efficiency.
Simplified Operations for Non-Technical Users
Portainer’s UI enabled team members with little container experience to manage logs, monitor deployments, and troubleshoot issues without relying on command-line tools. This democratized infrastructure management across the organization.
Efficient Hardware Utilization with GPU Support
Portainer’s ability to detect and configure GPU workloads allowed Open Signal to fully leverage existing hardware for video processing tasks. This eliminated the need for expensive cloud alternatives while still supporting high-performance workloads.
Results
✔ 240× Faster Deployment
Deployment time improved from two hours to as little as 30 seconds, dramatically accelerating release cycles.
✔ 100% Revenue Growth Potential
By enabling the development of entirely new services that were previously not feasible, Portainer is projected to support at least 100% revenue growth.
✔ Reduced Operational Costs
By maximizing on-premise infrastructure and minimizing reliance on expensive cloud services, Open Signal reduced operational expenditure while increasing performance.
✔ Increased Productivity and Modern Development Practices
The team rapidly adopted modern technologies such as JavaScript and React, supported by containerized workflows. Productivity increased as CI/CD pipelines and automated deployments became standard practice.
✔ Innovation Unlocked
With deployment and infrastructure friction removed, Open Signal began building new products and services that were previously impossible under legacy systems.
