The Cost of Kubernetes
Learn about the $34m opportunity companies reap from cloud-native and which costs you have to consider to build and operate a Kubernetes platform.
Watch nowGiant Swarm vs OpenShift
Learn why leading companies have migrated from OpenShift to Giant Swarm and experience faster time-to-market, higher productivity of their devops teams, better security and cost savings.
Read comparisonThe Cost of Kubernetes
Learn about the $34m opportunity companies reap from cloud-native and which costs you have to consider to build and operate a Kubernetes platform.
Watch nowHow to build a cloud-native stack?
Learn everything you need to know about the choices and best-practices for all key components you need to consider to build your cloud-native platform.
Read guideTaking our Roadmap Public
At Giant Swarm, everything we do is intertwined with our values. The decision to take our roadmap public is no exception. We began by challenging the status quo. Our roadmap has always resided in our private GitHub repository.
Read moreHow Postmortems help hardening our k8s clusters
Learn from Platform Engineer Marcel Müller how Giant Swarm uses postmortems to find and fix the root cause of an issue in one of our Kubernetes clusters.
Watch videoThe 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.
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.
“Without Giant Swarm we could not have met the project’s aggressive deadline. With Giant Swarm we made it on time.”
The IoT field is a new area of growth for the Vaillant group. The software is the product here. The goal is to make intelligent use of the data gathered from Vaillant's heating appliances to offer customers added value. Safe and reliable API services that are easy to use. As a result the Vaillant group not only offers its customers heating appliances and connectivity products on a one-off basis, but also provides an ongoing data-based service.
Speed is still the name of the game and in the 18 months following the initial launch of the cloud-native stack, Vaillant's IoT team rolled out 3 applications.
Industry: Manufacturing
Location: Germany
Foundation: 1874
Employees: 13,000
Use-Case(s): IoT
Cloud Type: Public
Challenges: Velocity, Resiliency,
Giant Swarm Customer since: 2018
Giant Swarm’s managed microservices infrastructure enables enterprises to run agile, resilient, distributed systems at scale, while removing the tasks related to managing the complex underlying infrastructure.