Migrating from Mirantis to Portainer
Customer Story: Stored Value Solutions
Business overview
Business Focus
Stored Value Solutions (SVS) are a worldwide leader in gift card programs managing more than 700+ gift card programs worldwide.
Based in the United States
SVS process more than 1.5 billion transactions annually in more than 50 countries.
Key Need For Portainer
Wanted to maintain their existing Docker infrastructure while also adding RBAC controls for developers to view logs while not having advanced privileges.
Container Platform
Docker Swarm
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.
"We used Docker Support probably once prior to Mirantis’ purchase of Docker. The one time we did, we were told to migrate to a newer version. Fast forward a year or so, and Mirantis purchases Docker and with that came a litany of new support issues.
Our goal was to maintain our Docker infrastructure while adding the ability for RBAC controls for developers to view logs in multiple environments while not having advanced privileges. Initially, we wanted Portainer but RBAC wasn’t quite ready. So for us, we went forward with Docker-EE. At that time it wasn’t a huge deal because it was still just Docker. With Mirantis however, the main focus was to push Kubernetes. It’s even in the name (MKE) for their replacement engine. On a conference call, we were told that Docker customers would be treated as first class citizens. I can tell you that’s very far from the truth. Even a base deploy now, whether you want it or not, includes Kubernetes.
Integrated Kubernetes adds a major headache when it comes to networking. It also adds additional headaches with deployments. Once you’ve grappled with all of that, you get into the complexity of what RHEL has decided to do with RHEL 8 in disabling API access for Docker. In my experience, this causes stability issues no matter how you slice it. What’s worse, I poured through their documentation and it had nothing in terms of answers for how to properly set up Docker in RHEL 8. Point in fact, I asked about 7 or 8 questions via email, and they couldn’t answer them after 7 days. "
The Decision
Remy researched “alternatives to Rancher” and discovered Portainer. He signed up for Portainer’s Take5 program, which gave him the first 5 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.”
Moving to a new platform, whatever it might be, isn't something you do without careful consideration to the impact and consequences.
To quote Travis:
“Enter Portainer Business. Neil (Portainer CEO) and his team have bent over backwards to help from day one. And I do mean Neil and his team. He’s as responsive as any of the team and for me personally, as a father who also coaches his kids in about everything they play, I respond to that kind of leadership, someone who leads from the front. Portainer just works. It does what Docker does best and uses the same KISS principle I grew up on. Just keep it simple.”
The Results
Remy researched “alternatives to Rancher” and discovered Portainer. He signed up for Portainer’s Take5 program, which gave him the first 5 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.”
For Stored Value Solutions, the benefits of switching to Portainer for their infrastructure management have been immediate and obvious.
Here's what Travis had to say:
“Portainer has been far and away a better product in my opinion. Simply based off the deployment alone, it’s far more straight forward, and there’s nothing deployed that isn’t needed.
One thing that Mirantis does (and I’m trying to think of the best/shortest way to say this) is to deploy 10 services when they could/should deploy 1 or 2. So with that in mind, if we deploy on Linux we aren’t just deploying for the Linux environment, but also deploying Windows connectors and agents. This leaves us with multiple services that are scaled at 0/0.
This is just unnecessary and seems like a security risk to have something constantly running/ listening with no purpose.
Further, it’s never been explained if we can remove them or not without causing problems with functionality.
All this to say, Portainer is far more logical in deployment. Portainer is also ready to be used in current Docker environments. Mirantis can’t even be deployed in 20.04 LTS yet. Further it’s still running on Docker 19. Portainer offers far more flexibility. If we want to use a previous version, no problem. If we want to run newer, we can do that, too. We have choice.
"Portainer just works. It does what Docker does best and uses the same KISS principle I grew up on. Just keep it simple. Portainer has been far and away a better product (than Mirantis) in my opinion. Simply based off the deployment alone, it’s far more straight forward, and there’s nothing deployed that isn’t needed. "
