About Vaillant Group

The Vaillant Group is a global market and technology leader in the fields of heating, ventilation and air-conditioning technology. For over 140 years, they have been following a strategy designed to achieve sustainable and profitable growth. Today, the company has 10 sites in 6 European countries and China. Its plants manufacture high-efficiency products.

In its bid to protect the environment, the Vaillant group are working towards challenging targets. These are: reducing CO₂ emissions by 25 percent, water consumption by 50 percent and waste volume by 20 percent.

Vaillant offers its customers worldwide eco-friendly, energy-saving heating, and ventilation systems. These are increasingly using renewable energy. These products are energy efficient and environmentally-friendly throughout their entire life cycle. From development to purchasing, production and use, all the way through to service and recycling.

Going digital

The process of digitization did not skip over the heating technology industry. Today, the Vaillant group’s day-to-day operations include software development, IT services and data-driven business models. This presents both an opportunity and a challenge. The transformation of a traditional industrial company into an industrial and technology company does not just happen. Active measures are needed to ensure its success. Digitization has made the ability to create innovative products in a short time more important than ever.

Speed was also the name of the game when it came to building the cloud-native infrastructure that was to support this initiative. There were six months alloted to this. The initial plan was to go with Kubernetes on Azure. Evaluation of proprietary Kubernetes solutions from Azure revealed that ACS was end of life and AKS still did not have all of the required functionality. The solution was vanilla Kubernetes running on Azure. Giant Swarm was chosen as a compliment to the Microsoft offering as they offered their fully managed solution on Azure. In this way the required business velocity was fully supported.

Despite a technology swap mid-project, the API developer program was ready for launch on time. Giant Swarm was introduced 2 months after the project start date, with no move on the end date, 4 months later. Without Giant Swarm the project would have gone beyond the allotted 6 months.