Yesterday I had the pleasure and the privilege to talk with Victoria Marchand and Thierry Weber in their daily “Cominmag” podcast. We talked about Cloud, DevOps, and the Swiss perspective: is it mandatory to jump into the Cloud? Are there providers here in Switzerland? (TL;DR: Yes there are!) What about the “hybrid” cloud? And much more!
Watch the video (in French) here or directly at cominmag.ch, the most important magazine about media, web, and marketing on the French side of Switzerland!
Aarno Aukia
Aarno is Co-Founder of VSHN AG and provides technical enthusiasm as a Service as CTO.
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2020 – what a year. The Corona pandemic has overtaken every area of life, including ours, of course. For most of the year, VSHNeers saw each other in Zoom calls instead of meeting in person. Our office would probably be unrecognizable to many of us, some VSHNeers who started new at VSHN in 2020 only know our office from photos (see also: Hiring and Onboarding New Employees During Corona and if you still need home office tips, see here, but don’t forget to have fun while doing it :). ).
But it is what it is, we just have to make the best of the situation. And VSHN made the best of it: despite the difficult and unplannable situation, we reacted in the best way possible. The transition to home office went smoothly, as we were already practiced in working remotely; the only thing we still had to “digitize” was the landline. Of course, we in the IT world are also privileged – not every industry can switch to home office “just like that”, and we should always be aware and gratious of that.
Now we have been in this situation for almost a year and of course the first “signs of wear and tear” such as “Zoom fatigue” are appearing, but what the VSHNeers miss most is socializing. Simply doing something together, be it a joint lunch or beers after work. At the beginning of the pandemic, the “Zoom beerings” were fun, but today no one wants to hang out in yet another Zoom in the evening. 🙂
Despite all this, VSHN as a company has also developed positively in 2020 and we have now grown to over 40 VSHNeers. We are very happy about this, and also a little bit proud. Each and every VSHNeer deserves a big thank you at this point. A big thank you also goes to our partners and customers, thank you for staying loyal to us despite the difficult situation.
Project Syn, our open source managed service framework, has been further developed (see intro video) and will continue to play a key role in our product portfolio in 2021.
In addition to the ISO 27001 certification, we are now also audited according to ISAE 3402 Type 1 (very recently also according to Type 2, more information on this soon on vshn.ch).
Transparency and openness are among our cornerstones, which is why we have further expanded our employee handbook and almost everything is open to the public.
We have organized a lot of events or participated as speakers, e.g. the WeAreDevelopers Live Week with Aarno & Adrian as speakers, participated in the Crossplane Community Day where Tobias held a lightning talk, went to the Red Hat forums in Austria and Germany, participated in the first Swiss Rancher Rodeo and organized the CNC meetups, APPUiO beerups, initiated the NGINX Meetup group Zurich and held a joint webinar with GitLab on Improving collaboration & software delivery using GitLab CI and Kubernetes.
VSHN appoints new Co-CEOs and Members of the Management
1. Feb 2021
VSHN – The DevOps Company – appoints two additional Members of the Management and appoints new General Managers.
Markus Speth (previously CMO) and Tobias Brunner (previously Head of Engineering) are now taking over as Co-CEO and form, together with Michèle Leibenzeder (Head of People Operations) and Manuela Banz (CFO) as well as Marco Fretz (Organizational Development) and Matthias Indermühle (Customer Projects), the new 6-person Management of VSHN. The founders Aarno Aukia (CTO) and Patrick Mathers (previously CEO) will in future focus on strategic development as Members of the Board in addition to their operational activities in growth and backoffice.
VSHN Management 2021 (Tobias Brunner, Markus Speth, Michèle Leibenzeder, Manuela Banz, Marco Fretz, Matthias Indermühle)VSHN Board 2021 (Patrick Mathers, Aarno Aukia, Bruce Mathers)
Zurich, February 1 2021
VSHN – The DevOps Company, the leading IT platform provider and expert in container, Kubernetes and managed services, is expanding its leadership team and realigning both its Management and Board.
CEO Patrick Mathers and CTO Aarno Aukia move from the Management to the Board and appoint Tobias Brunner and Markus Speth as new Co-CEOs. In addition, Michèle Leibenzeder and Manuela Banz join the Management. Marco Fretz and Matthias Indermühle complete the future Management of VSHN. With these appointments, VSHN is ushering in the next generation of the management and growth stage and is making itself fit for the future.
VSHN is a fast-growing Swiss technology company based in Zurich with an international customer base, winner of the Digital Economy Award, first Swiss Kubernetes Certified Service Provider and has been ranked in the top 10 fastest growing ICT companies two times in a row. With over 40 employees, VSHN manages more than 100,000 services for 350 different partners in various clouds and on-premises. VSHN counts Swiss banks and fintechs, telcos, large ecommerce retailers, the Swiss Federation and the Australian government among its customers and operates APPUiO.ch, one of the largest container platforms for customers on-premises and in the cloud.
VSHN is investing heavily in scalability through self-organizing, autonomous teams and is constantly developing the organizational structures required for this, for example with patterns from Sociocracy 3.0. The personnel changes in management and leadership represent the next logical step in growth and enable a better focus and division of work areas and responsibilities.
Both Patrick Mathers as previous CEO and Aarno Aukia as CTO will concentrate in the future on the strategic development of VSHN in the Board in addition to their operational activities and will therefore withdraw from the Management. The General Management will be taken over by two long-time VSHNeers in tandem as Co-CEO: Tobias Brunner and Markus Speth.
“Due to the growth of VSHN, this is a logical step. In the first few years, I was very close to the day-to-day business and was able to manage the financial aspects in particular well. However, the strategic development of VSHN is becoming more and more important. And since we have been able to recruit extremely competent people for the management and as Co-CEOs, I can face my new challenges with peace of mind and pleasure.”
Patrick Mathers
“Patrick and I have realized that we simply do not have enough time to take care of the future company strategy and strategic development. We are handing over the management to 6 extremely capable VSHNeers, three of whom have been with us since the founding. Tobias and Markus complement each other perfectly for the task as Co-CEO and both will positively develop the ‘VSHNaryness’ in our sense for many years.”
Aarno Aukia
“We are very pleased with this huge trust placed in us and gladly accept the task to jointly represent VSHN as Co-CEO in the future.”
Tobias Brunner and Markus Speth
“When I started at VSHN in the fall of 2014 as the very first employee, with no office and no (corporate) infrastructure at all, just my personal laptop at home, I would never, ever have predicted that VSHN would grow to over 40 VSHNeers in this short period of time. This is absolutely exciting. VSHN has always been an unconventional company in terms of how we are organized and how we operate – it’s part of our DNA. VSHNeers have always been involved in the decisions of the company. With the move to organize our company according to the principles of Sociocracy 3.0 (S3), we have further strengthened the involvement of every VSHNeer in the decision-making process. Together with Markus Speth, we will form a Co-CEO team, which I feel is a good thing to do things as a team rather than alone. Since I have known Markus for a very long time and we have worked together at various previous companies, we know how to work together. We will share this task and do our best to move VSHN forward and keep the momentum we have gained.”
Tobias Brunner
“I am very much looking forward to being the driving force behind VSHN as Co-CEO alongside Tobias, to be an important pillar in the further growth and to master future challenges. When I started as Chief Marketing Officer at VSHN in July 2018, I was no stranger to the VSHNeers as we already knew each other from various engagements and I knew the drive the people behind VSHN have. I am absolutely convinced of our strategic direction and especially of our team, the VSHNeers, who ultimately make the difference. We have a lot of ideas for the next chapters of VSHN, how we can take further growth paths and develop as an organization as a whole to focus even more on customers, partners and VSHNeers. Let’s tackle it together.”
Markus Speth
In addition, VSHN has appointed further Members to the Management: Manuela Banz as CFO and Michèle Leibenzeder, responsible for People Operations. Marco Fretz, who joined the Management in July 2020, continues to be responsible for organizational development and operations, and Matthias Indermühle, who has been a Member of the Management since the founding and who is responsible for customer projects, complete VSHNs Management.
Michèle Leibenzeder is a VSHNeer since the founding of VSHN and has single-handedly mastered the balance between the various areas of people, finance, events and purchasing as Office Manager until 2019. In 2019, VSHN had reached a size where it became necessary to split these areas to ensure the best possible coverage. For this reason, Michèle was appointed Head of PeopleOperations to be able to focus on the needs of our employees and to work towards achieving the North Star Goal “VSHNeers are the happiest employees”.
“I have never worked for a company as long as I have for VSHN. It’s probably because the company values match my values. VSHN gives us freedom and trust, values personal initiative and that you are constantly developing. At VSHN, no one is still doing the same job he or she was hired for after five years. That is super exciting and fulfilling for me. I am convinced that the success or failure of a business idea (and the business strategy derived from it by management) depends on one single factor: the people who implement it. VSHN draws the consequence from this realization that a seat for PeopleOperations is needed in the Management. This positions VSHN in the “war for talents” and further emphasizes the importance of people.”
Michèle Leibenzeder
Manuela Banz joined VSHN in 2019 and has taken over as Head of Accounting.
“I have been a VSHNeer for just over a year and thus am a part of this enterprise. I am all the more pleased that I have already been appointed to the Management team. I am honored to strengthen the Management and to be able to contribute my expertise in finance now to the Management team. I am convinced that this reorganization of the Management will enable us to master future challenges and continue to grow as a company.”
Manuela Banz
VSHN lays the foundation for further successful and healthy growth and has big plans for the future. As an open and transparent company, VSHN is committed to the open source idea, supports CH-Open, the Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, among others, and publicly communicates Values, Beliefs and Goals in its handbook: https://handbook.vshn.ch/
Patrick Mathers and Aarno Aukia founded VSHN in 2014 because they saw a big gap between software developers and traditional hosting companies. As a Lean Startup, VSHN has focused on IT platform operations through automation, agility, and a continuous improvement process so that software developers can focus on their business and IT operations are relieved. Completely location-independent and without its own hardware, VSHN today operates applications according to the DevOps principle on any infrastructure or cloud in various countries worldwide.
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
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It’s hard to believe what has become of the joint project between Puzzle ITC and VSHN. Today, APPUiO is the leading Kubernetes-based container platform for the design, development and operation of applications. Based on proven open source concepts such as Kubernetes, APPUiO supports the DevOps approach. This accelerates development, deployment and operation processes through automation and self-service. Likewise, collaboration between software developers and operations organization is improved.
Of course, as you know us, we would have loved to celebrate with you in person and toast our 5th birthday. But since this is still not possible, we thought of something new and created a video that briefly explains what we do with APPUiO and who is behind it. Have fun watching!
How VSHN’s organization evolves using Sociocracy 3.0
23. Dec 2020
As we grew beyond 25 VSHNeers (that’s what we call our employees), we realized more and more things that were preventing us from meeting our customers’ needs, developing innovative new products or maintaining our unique employee culture. The bigger we got, the more we thought we needed to improve the organization to stay fit for the future. This is about the first steps on our journey how Sociocracy 3.0 helps us evolve our organizational structure, empower people and improve customer service.
VSHN automates software build, deploy, provisioning, backup, observability, alerting and incident management for production applications on any cloud with 24/7 support. A top down, waterfall like hierarchical organization would probably not have helped or brought us there. We always worked in a very agile and democratic way. Furthermore we believe that people do their best if the organization effectively empowers them to do so. Most of the organizational changes were just done by “gut feeling” and talking to each other.
Identifying Pain Points
We felt that it is no longer scalable or beneficial to organize our tech teams around technology (like OpenShift or Puppet managed services). This separation worked well as long as customers used one technology stack or the other. Today’s customers benefit from all the technologies in which VSHN has expertise. As a consequence, customers have been served by two or more teams. To counteract this lack of customer ownership somewhat, we have introduced the concept of Service Managers, who take responsibility for a customer across multiple teams.
Ultimately, this still resulted in customers being served inconsistently. Customers had to be in contact with two or more teams. Both is by no means efficient or customer-friendly.
The teams sometimes felt controlled and overruled by the Service Managers. It also led to a sort of “fight” between Service Managers as to who would get a team’s help first.
Teams also could not decide for themselves how best to serve a customer or change their work methods.
Day-to-day business and customer projects usually took precedence over product development. This is, because there was no clear separation between these areas of activity.
It was often not clear who to ask regarding a particular product or customer.
In order to change such organizational conditions, we lacked the structures to make major decisions as a company with the involvement of everyone affected. This resulted in some decisions being made by individuals, which negatively impacted some of the teams. “Gut feeling” was no longer good enough.
As you can see, it was time to rethink aspects of our organization to keep VSHN fit for the future – and to better enable VSHNeers to do their jobs and improve customer experience as well.
Where to Start
One of the first organizational changes we thought about was organizing our teams by customer and product instead of by technology group. An idea that already started to emerge at the VSHNDay 2019.
We want several cross-functional Customer Solution Teams, each of which is assigned a group of customers. This means that a customer is served solely by one team. With the Service Manager as a full member of the team, the team could decide independently on the working methods, work planning and the most suitable solutions for their customers in order to provide the best possible service.
Additionally we want one or more Product Teams, each responsible for a specific group of products. With the product owner as a team member, the team could decide autonomously about the product backlog, working methods and technical solution approaches. This would allow the team to fully focus on its products to develop features, fix bugs and maintain the (code-) base, and support the Solution Teams which use their products.
So how do we do this? At the end of 2019, we decided that we will start using patterns from Sociocracy 3.0 as soon as we see something we can use to evolve. Sociocracy 3.0 – or S3 for short – (not the Simple Storage Service ) because it fits best what we have already been doing implicitly for the last few years – mainly the principle about equivalence and consent.
Autonomy of Teams
Just give our teams autonomy to do what they think is best, right? Fortunately, there’s more to this story. We want to give autonomy to a team, as long as the team is aligned with the wider company goals, knows its area of influence, its tasks, and its constraints. Or, to put it another way, each team needs to know the parameters within which it exists, works, and can grow as a team. But that’s not all, each person or team will encounter situations that they cannot address or decide on their own, we need structures to support our teams in discussing and deciding on issues that affect multiple teams or other domains of the business.
We (and S3) call this Accountability which includes Autonomy and Alignment. To achieve company alignment and team accountability, we figured out that we need:
Goals transparent to everyone that clearly show a chain of purpose: So we started building our own Alignment Framework orienting ourselves on the idea of Spotify Rhythm.
Clear descriptions on what a team is accountable for: This is where S3 Domains and Circles came into play.
Once we knew our areas of influence within the company (the domains) we could find out how they relate to or are contained in each other. This lead us to a clear idea of who delegates “accountability” a team for example.
Decision Making
Starting to transform our organizational structures required us to make a lot of decisions.
We needed a way to make those decisions quickly while still involving the people affected.
We needed a way to make decisions on “usable” over “perfect” solutions.
S3 with the concepts and patterns of Consent, Navigate via Tension and Proposal Forming is the way we choose to address this challenge. Now we could start making decisions that are good enough for now, safe enough to try until the next review.
Good enough might sound wrong, right? Not really, in the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world we live in, there is never a perfect plan or solution. Something we knew from Agile Software Development. We want iterative and small changes, learn fast what impact something has and react by reviewing and making the next decisions quickly again. VSHN actually did this from day one – just that now we need to do this for decisions with wider reach, affecting much more people and customers.
The key here is Consent. Consent does not mean that everyone agrees (often confused with consensus), it means to do something unless there is a reason not to do it, until we review it again. One reason might be if there is a risk to the organization or if we would overlook a worthwhile opportunity to directly improve the proposal.
Who decides
Involving everyone in every decision that we have to make can hinder agility and speed. Furthermore getting involved in too many different topics would also put a high mental strain on everyone. The key here is to limit people’s areas of influence through domains, that is, to make it clear which decisions are the responsibility of which group.
In response to that, we adapt the S3 concept of Delegate Circles. Here, all teams that would be affected send a representative to form a “virtual” circle. Delegates can then make decisions on behalf of their teams. This is about trust – people should be able to trust their delegate or other teams or groups that are responsible for other domains in the company. In return, they have the peace of mind that they don’t have to take care of everything that goes on in your company themselves – knowing that ultimately they will always have a means to raise an objection to a past decision, existing agreement or activity.
Sociocracy 3.0 (S3) in a Nutshell
Sociocracy 3.0 (S3) is a free social technology for growing agile and resilient organizations at any size, from small start-ups to large international organizations. Using S3 can help to achieve objectives and successfully navigate complexity. You can make changes one step at a time, without the need for sudden radical reorganization or planning a long-term change initiative. S3 is:
Flexible: adaptable patterns, independent and mutually reinforcing, to help you with all aspects of collaboration
Principles-based: a coherent way for growing organizational integrity and developing an agile mindset
Where we are right now and what the next steps are
We have managed to form three accountable Teams. One product team and two customer solution teams. The first review of these teams shows that our approach of building teams around customers OR products works. The autonomy allows our teams to find the best way to work and improve as a team.
We have clear domain descriptions for most areas of VSHN by now. This already helps other teams that are not directly affected by the ongoing team changes by clarifying who is responsible for what.
Our Alignment Framework already gives us clarity on what VSHN actually is, what our goals are and how we prioritize features and products for product development and drivers for organizational improvement.
We found a way to implement Consent Decision Making (from Tension, Driver over Decision Making and Review of Agreement) in a mostly asynchronous and written way, which is important in the current, nearly fully-remote world. We call this the VSHN Improvement Process.
As a side effect we’re getting rid of the terms Squad and Chapters which came from the Spotify “model” (There Is No Spotify Model).
Next steps
Bring the remaining old tech teams into the new model of Solution Teams.
Sociocracy 3.0 Internal Learning Group and Educations – we need to spread the S3 knowledge.
S3 Facilitators that can lead by example. It’s important that people can guide VSHNeers in their daily work live and through decision making.
Summary – Our Experience
Change is hard. But overall so far, we believe that we are on the right way. We understand why we are making these changes, together as VSHN and while keeping a strong customer focus.
We learned that organizations can be broken down into two “spaces”. There is the system and there are people in the system. People need the system to see their purpose, to know what they are responsible for, what is expected of them, and where the boundaries and limitations are. Without people finding their place and being committed to make the system work, the system can’t work. We focused a lot on the new structures in the last months. Now again we need to focus on continuously invest in people to enable them to thrive in the system.
What we really like about S3 is the iterative approach. Incremental changes, experimenting and flexibility combined with consent decision making – all these patterns form a better organization in our view. On the other hand incremental changes can leave people between an old and the new world – we saw this being a problem, confusing people and breaking processes that worked earlier – it’s important to find the balance between small enough, incremental changes and not loosing track of where we want to go.
What do you think? What are your experiences? We would be happy to hear the stories you can tell about organizational changes.
Marco Fretz
Marco is one of VSHN's General Managers and Chief Operating Officer.
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we are pleased to inform you about our opening hours during Christmas and New Year. Of course, we will ensure a smooth platform operation also this year over the holidays.
We are available for you as follows:
12/24/2020: 9:00am to 12:00am
12/25/2020: closed
12/30/2020: 9:00am to 6:00pm
12/31/2020: 9:00am to 12:00am
01/01/2021: closed
From Monday, January 4 2021 we are back recovered and fit from 9:00 am to 6:00 pm for you.
Of course, our customers with 24/7 support SLA will enjoy our support day and night also on Christmas and New Year in case of emergency. VSHN AG and all VSHNeers wish you all wonderful, contemplative, and happy holidays! See you soon and here’s to a promising 2021!
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
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Lightning talk at the Crossplane Community Day December 2020
I attended the Crossplane Community Day (actually evening for the Europeans) on December 15th 2020 which was titled „Modernizing with an API-centric Control Plane“.
In my lightning talk „Crossplane as a cornerstone in a next-gen hosted DevOps platform“ I introduced the project which we’re currently working on with Swisscom and revealed the Open Sourcing of our Crossplane Open Service Broker API integration. This Open Service Broker (OSB) integration with Crossplane allows to consume Crossplane objects by any OSB capable client infrastructure like Cloud Foundry and makes it possible to offer any kind of services via the many Crossplane providers. More of what we do with this integration will be written in an upcoming blog post. The application is currently in a PoC state and available on GitHub under https://github.com/vshn/crossplane-service-broker-poc. We’re actively working on the production implementation in https://github.com/vshn/crossplane-service-broker.
Crossplane was released in version 1.0 at this event. I was eagerly waiting for this release since about a year when we first discovered Crossplane and experimented with it. Congratulations to the Crossplane community and contributors and I’m really looking forward to see what happens with Crossplane in 2021 and beyond – also what we’ll do with it at VSHN. Exciting times ahead!
There where many great and very interesting talks to listen to. The recording of the full event will be available in the next days, check back the social media channels to get notified about it.
During the event I was active in the Crossplane Slack channel and was able to capture some very interesting questions and answers around Crossplane and the wider ecosystem.
Here are my highlights quoted
Question
Why would one want to use Crossplane rather than the hyperscaler’s operators, like AWS ACK and Azure Service operator directly?
Answer
Good question – I think the key reasons you might choose Crossplane boil down to the XRM and Composition. XRM is the Crossplane Resource Model – if you’re using more than one cloud, our CRs work the same way across them all. Similar patterns. (Or even if you’re using providers for things like SQL users and database, or Helm charts.) Composition is a layer we provide on top of XRM compliant resources that let you define your own APIs (your own CRs) without writing code. So you can build your own classes of service and opinionated APIs atop those raw low level APIs.
Also bears mentioning that we are working with them on code generating crossplane controllers from the same codegen pipeline, so below a certain level of abstraction we will be sharing code for interacting with provider SDKs.
How about advantages if any for on-prem private clouds?
Answer
The answer is about the same there, as compared to something that might operate databases etc on-prem. Admittedly though our provider support for on-prem is lighter on the ground. Definitely appreciate contributions there!
The other thing I’ll add here, is Crossplane can give you a cloud-like provisioning experience in your on-premises environment which can be a big win for developers.
Question
Is it correct that external resources are not namespaced in Crossplane? If so, what is the rationale? If there’s a design doc that covers it, that would be great
Answer
With the whole separation of concerns thing we treat managed resources (our CRs that represent ERs) as a platform / infra concern, so they’re cluster scoped like a node or a PV. The claims that represent them are namespaced. This is kind of handy in two ways:
If you imagine an API server that’s dedicated to Crossplane, the platform team can view all the managed resources in one big global view, but see the claims that represent those resources broken down by namespace (i.e. often by team).
Sometimes we don’t want to offer a claim for an XR – e.g. a VPC XR is probably only something the platform operators want to control.
The big one – sometimes we want cross resource refs that would violate namespace boundaries. Imagine for example the platform folks create a VPC XR, and folks making claims down in namespaces can make a claim for a database that they want to be connected to that VPC. If the VPC was off in the “platform-infra” namespace or whatever they’d need to reference it across namespaces.
An alternative answer is that we designed for a world where we can partition concerns just like PV/PVC
Question
Re the current Terraform talk – is the idea to use Terraform providers to generate Crossplane CRDs and controllers that run independent of Terraform… or is the idea to proxy the CRDs through an in-cluster Terraform controller?
Answer
More the former. Terraform is actually a couple of processes running together – each provider is a process that has a gRPC API, and the terraform CLI tool sits in front of that. We run those provider binaries, but we put a Kubernetes controller in (i.e. a Crossplane provider) in front of them instead of the terraform CLI.
Furthermore I discovered some new tools:
Kubernetes External Secrets: „Kubernetes External Secrets allows you to use external secret management systems, like AWS Secrets Manager or HashiCorp Vault, to securely add secrets in Kubernetes“
We want to determine again the current state of DevOps. Our goal with this study is to investigate how you and your company understand DevOps and whether you already work according to DevOps principles. The current state of DevOps, reasons for and against an introduction of the DevOps philosophy and where the development is headed will be determined. We will compare the results with the ones from last year to be able to draw conclusions and see trends directly.
Survey
The survey is open until February 28, 2021 and may of course be shared, forwarded and retweeted with others. We shortened the survey compared to last year – you should only need about 5 minutes. Click here for the survey and enjoy!DevOps 2021 Survey
Why should you take part?
Four years after our first check on DevOps in Switzerland, it is time to take a closer look at the current state and the adoption of DevOps in 2021. Therefore, we are conducting a study on the state of DevOps in Switzerland.
We will send each survey participant a (of course anonymised) report ‘DevOps in Switzerland’ upon request, in which we compare this year’s results with those of last year, in order to be able to derive trends and better understand the development of DevOps. Therefore you will be asked for your email address at the end of the survey.
Help us determine the current state of DevOps in Switzerland!
What is DevOps?
DevOps is not a rigid term and is often understood differently. By hiring a DevOps Engineer, a company does not automatically become a DevOps organization. DevOps is also not to be equated with the use of certain tools or software. DevOps cannot be “bought” and DevOps is not a detached team within the organization. The cultural aspect should also not be underestimated – the corporate culture is the most important reason for a functioning DevOps organization.
The idea behind DevOps is that people work together in harmony and use processes and techniques to continuously benefit the end customer.
DevOps is a common term, but unfortunately as vague as ‘Cloud’: Although everyone knows that he wants it or needs it and yet it is not something that you can just order and get delivered the next day.
Tobias Brunner holds Lightning Talk at Crossplane Community Day 2020
25. Nov 2020
The Future of Cloud Engineering is a Universal API
Tuesday, December 15, 2020, 10.00 am PST (which is 7 pm CET) • Virtual Event
Tobias will be sharing the stage with Bassam Tabbara CEO Upbound, Kelsey Hightower Developer Advocate Google, Joe Beda Principal Engineer VMware, and many more.
Tobias Brunner’s Lightning Talk about how VSHN uses Crossplane
When? On Tuesday, December 15, 2020, 12.50 pm PST (which is 9.50 pm CET) What? Lightning Talk: Crossplane as a cornerstone in a next-gen hosted DevOps platform Who? Tobias Brunner, Head of DevOps & Partner of VSHN – The DevOps Company:
What is Crossplane Community Day
Join us for the second Crossplane Community Day to hear about how using a Universal Cloud API can help you eliminate infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid security pitfalls, and deliver apps faster. Come hear from industry experts on how the Kubernetes-style API is modernizing application and infrastructure management beyond traditional infrastructure as code approaches.
Speakers include:
Bassam Tabbara CEO Upbound
Kelsey Hightower Developer Advocate Google
Joe Beda Principal Engineer VMware
Brendan Burns Distinguished Engineer Microsoft
Jay Pipes Principal Open Source Engineer Amazon
Daniel Mangum Software Engineer Upbound
Partnership VSHN & Crossplane
VSHN has always been cloud-agnostic and will further enhance this paradigm by partnering with Crossplane – „The open-source multi-cloud control plane“. We are using Crossplane for example as a cornerstone in our next-gen hosted DevOps product and Project Syn. Crossplane is an extensible open-source platform that adds declarative cloud service provisioning and management to the Kubernetes API with excellent support for GitOps-style continuous deployments for cloud-native apps that is at the heart of the next-gen offering of VSHN. Project Syn is designed to run on all Kubernetes distributions and clouds. It’s prepared to support all the specific features of any given cloud and Kubernetes distribution by abstracting the specifics. This means Project Syn will run on OpenShift with APPUiO.ch, Rancher Kubernetes, and all managed Kubernetes offerings. Support for even more Kubernetes flavors and clouds are added on demand. By leveraging Crossplane, the user of Project Syn can specify the backend services needed in a completely cloud-independent way. Provisioning of these services happens fully automated, handled by the tooling in the most optimal way. You can find out more about the VSHN & Crossplane partnership here and on Netzwoche.
About Crossplane
Crossplane is an open-source multi-cloud control plane to manage your cloud-native applications and infrastructure across environments, clusters, regions, and clouds. It enables provisioning and full-lifecycle management of applications and managed services from your choice of cloud using kubectl. Crossplane can be installed into an existing Kubernetes cluster to add managed service provisioning or deployed as a dedicated control plane for multi-cluster management and workload scheduling. Crossplane enables the community to build and publish Stacks to add more clouds and cloud services to Crossplane with support for out-of-tree extensibility and independent release schedules. Crossplane includes Stacks for GCP, AWS, and Azure today.
About VSHN – The DevOps Company
VSHN (pronounced ˈvɪʒn like “vision”) is Switzerland’s leading DevOps, Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, and 24/7 cloud operations partner. VSHN was founded with the intention to fundamentally shake up the hosting market. As a lean startup, we have focused on operating IT platforms through automation, agility, and a continuous improvement process. Completely location-independent and without our own hardware, we operate extensive applications according to the DevOps principle agile and 24/7 on every infrastructure, so that software developers can concentrate on their business and IT operations are relieved.
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
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VSHN joins the GitLab Channel Partner Program to strengthen GitLab’s presence in Switzerland and beyond and help companies make the best out of their DevOps journey. Zurich, Switzerland, November 18 2020: VSHN – The DevOps Company today announced it has joined the partner program for GitLab, the single application for the DevOps lifecycle, as a Channel partner. This strategic relationship delivers a great benefit to both GitLab and VSHN and their partners respectively. “GitLab is excited to build a strategic relationship with VSHN,” said Michelle Hodges, vice president of global channels at GitLab. “VSHN’s expertise across DevOps, Managed Services and Kubernetes Operations is helping companies to focus on their core business and makes them a great fit for the GitLab Partner Program and enables us to work together to create high-value services for our mutual customers.” Listen to what GitLab’s CEO Sid Sijbrandij has to say about the partnership with VSHN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p31CN5SN3UM Thank you very much, Sid!
GitLab at VSHN
VSHN allows you to take on your DevOps journey with GitLab. GitLab is one of the core DevOps tools we use at VSHN and which we are utilizing at our partners to help them run their application. We have been using GitLab internally and for our customers and partners for a long time and can offer both GitLab licenses and Managed GitLab as a complete package as a managed service. Customers can benefit from our many years of experience with GitLab and building CI/CD pipelines. GitLab is available in 4 different subscriptions from Free to Ultimate, depending on your needs. You can learn more about GitLab plans and pricing here.
GitLab in Switzerland
GitLab is no stranger to Switzerland and has a strong presence in the Swiss financial services industry. As an example, UBS and GitLab have just recently signed a multi-year contract for a strategic collaboration. This complements UBS’s cloud journey, which is targeted at developing a market leading, dynamic development experience – with the ultimate goal to faster produce high quality solutions for clients, while increasing efficiency. As members of the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), UBS and GitLab address common industry challenges and drive innovation in the financial industry. We as VSHN think that such initiatives strengthen the Swiss FSI and workplace Switzerland. VSHN also works with several partners in the financial services area, for example acrevis bank, CreditGate24, esurance or neon.
Learn more
For more information, go to GitLab at VSHN and also join our upcoming Webinar on Improving collaboration & software delivery using GitLab CI and Kubernetes and the Switzerland GitLab Meetup Group.
About GitLab
GitLab is an open core company which develops software for the software development lifecycle used by more than 100,000 organizations, 30 million estimated registered users, and has an active community of more than 3000 contributors. GitLab openly shares more information than most companies and is public by default, meaning our projects, strategy, direction and metrics are discussed openly and can be found within our website. Our values are Collaboration, Results, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging , Iteration, and Transparency and these form our culture.
About VSHN – The DevOps Company
VSHN is Switzerland’s leading DevOps, Docker, Kubernetes and 24/7 cloud operations partner. VSHN was founded with the intention to fundamentally shake up the hosting market. As a lean startup, we have focused on operating IT platforms through automation, agility and a continuous improvement process. Completely location-independent and without our own hardware, we operate extensive applications according to the DevOps principle agilely and 24/7 on every infrastructure, so that software developers can concentrate on their business and IT operations are relieved. With APPUiO.ch we have created a container platform on which we can offer Managed Services as a PaaS solution on any infrastructure: public, dedicated, private and on-premises.
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
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Red Hat Partner Case Study: VSHN powers DevOps with container PaaS built on OpenShift
6. Nov 2020
Red Hat partner case study with VSHN
VSHN disrupts the hosting market by focusing on operating IT platforms through automation, agility, and a continuous improvement process. The partnership with Red Hat ensures VSHN customers have the speed and scale to accommodate immediate changes and deployments both on-premise and in the cloud. We are very pleased about our partnership with Red Hat and in this engaging story we tell you about the history of VSHN and how Red Hat solutions helped us achieve our goals and that of our partners and customers.
VSHN powers DevOps with container PaaS built on Red Hat OpenShift
The mission of VSHN – The DevOps Company is to have its customers be confident about their online business operations. VSHN disrupts the hosting market by focusing on operating IT platforms through automation, agility, and a continuous improvement process. APPUiO, VSHN’s managed container platform, is built on Red Hat OpenShift with orchestration from Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. The partnership with Red Hat ensures VSHN customers have the speed and scale to accommodate immediate changes and deployments both on-premise and in the cloud. Because VSHN’s roots are in Switzerland, the country of banks and insurance companies (check out our fintech success stories), it is able to focus on security and strong engagement in the developer community while managing applications and platforms in 16 countries worldwide.
“When we started, Red Hat Switzerland was not aware of our vision, our ambition. We were barely 20 people, but Red Hat took the time to get to know us. They are a huge global business, but, for us, Red Hat is also a local company. Red Hat and Red Hat OpenShift have been an important pillar for our success from the beginning. The Certified Cloud and Service Provider Program fits perfectly into our future growth strategy and innovations.” Aarno Aukia Chief Technology Officer, VSHN
Establishing a fully managed container Platform-as-a-Service
VSHN focuses on operating IT platforms through automation, agility, and a continuous improvement process. It wants to address the Ops in DevOps, letting software developers concentrate on their business. Aarno Aukia, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of VSHN, said the company aims to fill the gap between software developers and cloud service providers. “If software developers are architects, we see ourselves as civil engineers. We take care of the foundation, they’re free to be creative. It’s a collaborative relationship,” said Aukia. Aukia established a fully managed container Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for enterprise customers. The service needed to be robust, scalable, and secure. The platform must support software developers in making applications automatically testable and deployable, and be able to operate on any infrastructure. “Our goal is to supply the agile infrastructure developers need to scale their software quickly,” said Aukia.
Ensuring enterprise-grade support for critical container PaaS
VSHN is part of the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider (CCSP) Program, which helps enterprise IT organizations use cloud technologies to lower costs, improve operational flexibility, and stay ahead of the competition. It has used Red Hat OpenShift since 2015; Red Hat OpenShift unifies operations and delivery on-premise, in cloud, and in hybrid environments for enterprise supported Kubernetes. “We’re an open source company, our values are open, the way we operate is open,” said Aukia. “Red Hat shares those values, and can also ensure enterprise-level support worth paying for. The container PaaS is critical for our customers. It cannot go unsupported.” Red Hat OpenShift strengthens DevSecOps for different enterprise customers through rolebased access control and other security-by-default. In addition, VSHN uses Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for orchestration and maintenance of its managed server products and to provide customization and engineering services.
Filling the gap between developer and infrastructure
Helped VSHN launch a fully managed container PaaS APPUiO is VSHN’s enterprise-focused container platform. The fully managed service, launched in 2016, is based on Red Hat OpenShift, and provides customers with the flexibility to be in cloudbased public, dedicated, private, or on-premise environments. The partnership with Red Hat ensures APPUiO users have the speed and scale to accommodate immediate changes and deployments and strengthens VSHN’s engagement among Switzerland’s developer community. The use of Red Hat OpenShift means VSHN can supply customers with a self-service container PaaS that can be activated and operational within minutes. Applications can be deployed and operated by developers and DevOps themselves, independent of other teams. The launch of APPUiO helped VSHN assist customers with the creation of both their platform and application, from planning via installation to operations. “Also, the size and status of Red Hat has a major impact when we target enterprise customers. Customers trust Red Hat. This has opened doors for us,” said Aukia. Ensured speed and scale to accommodate immediate changes and deployments Red Hat OpenShift improves customer time to market for new applications or software updates. In addition, it helps maximize service efficiency with ongoing upgrades and automation. Customers can automate the building, testing, and deployment of applications. VSHN is running 50 OpenShift clusters in 16 countries. To date, APPUiO has been used by banks, healthcare providers, and insurance companies. For instance, acrevis, a regional Swiss bank, is building its digital future on the platform. It claims publicly to now be faster to market with new digital services. “For us, the APPUiO container platform is a perfect solution, especially from the cost/benefit point of view,” said Christian Gentsch, Member of the Executive Board, acrevis. Strengthened engagement with developer community Community and open values are at the heart of VSHN. Aukia said the fact APPUiO is built entirely on open source components is key. There is a community chat for support and to encourage the exchange of ideas and improvements. “There is an assumption in the open source world that you will get your hands dirty,” Aukia explained. “But at an enterprise level, that comes with certain expectations.” The engagement with Red Hat ensures the support, roadmap, and foresight to keep customers on track. “We assume the same kind of openness by providing our documentation and code to the community,” Aukia added. “Together, open source software, open standards, and openly available documentation guarantee supplier independence to the highest possible extent and protect from vendor lock-in.”
Thinking globally, acting locally
The long-term challenge for VSHN is to remain relevant in that gap between developers and infrastructure. The engagement with Red Hat, and the global ambitions of VSHN’s Swiss-based enterprise customers, give cause for optimism. “When we started, Red Hat Switzerland was not aware of our vision, our ambition. We were barely 20 people, but Red Hat took the time to get to know us. They are a huge global business, but for us, Red Hat is also a local company,” Aukia said.
VSHN is Switzerland’s leading DevOps, Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, and 24/7 cloud operations partner. It focuses on operating IT platforms through automation, agility, and a continuous improvement process. Completely location-independent and without its own hardware, VSHN operates according to the DevOps principle, agilely and 24/7 on every infrastructure. VSHN is the first Swiss Kubernetes Certified Service Provider (KCSP) and the winner of the Swiss Digital Economy Award 2019.
About Red Hat
Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies Red Hat helps customers integrate new and existing IT applications, develop cloud-native applications, standardize on our industry-leading operating system, and automate, secure, and manage complex environments. Award-winning support, training, and consulting services make Red Hat a trusted adviser to the Fortune 500. As a strategic partner to cloud providers, system integrators, application vendors, customers, and open source communities, Red Hat can help organizations prepare for the digital future.
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
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VSHN on YouTube and Adrian's first video #VSHN.timer
27. Oct 2020
Video is the new normal, or is it?
As visual species, we humans usually find videos more memorable and “easier to consume” than any other type of content. Be it to tell stories, for explanatory or cat videos or during the pandemic to give a more personal insight behind the scenes of VSHN.
Videos are on the advance and the popularity of YouTube, TikTok and Co. is growing without limits. For example, Cisco estimates that in 2021, 80% of all traffic will be video. And YouTube now has 2 billion users.
Did you know that VSHN has a YouTube channel?
Since we always want to learn and like to try something new, we plan to publish more videos about us and our work in the future.
Join us and subscribe to our YouTube channel and look forward to cool video content from the VSHNeers. 😊
Adrian in the first video VSHN.timer
Adrian has been publishing the VSHN.timer for quite some time now collecting exciting technical news and links, which are published in text form in the weekly VSHN.timer.
And now for the first time as video. What do you think about his first try? Watch below, we think it is awesome. 😊
We are happy to hear your feedback!
Your VSHNeers
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
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Project Syn is nominated for the DINAcon Award 2020
22. Oct 2020
DINAcon 2020
The DINAcon, conference for digital sustainability, takes place annually at the Welle7 Workspace in Bern. Inspiring keynote inputs and selected sessions will bring together Opinion Leaders from politics, business, the public sector and the digitalisation scene at the conference and discuss how digital transformation can be implemented with sustainable added value for society and the environment. DINAcon 2020 is organized by the Research Centre Digital Sustainability of the University of Bern and is supported by the location partner Welle7 Workspace and numerous partner organisations.
DINAcon Awards on Friday October 23, 2020
Every year, the DINAcon Awards are awarded to open projects by communities, companies, administrations, organisations and individuals at the DINAcon Conference. Participation is free of charge, projects from all over Europe are eligible. The winner of the DINAcon Business Award 2020 is automatically nominated for the “Digital Economy Awards” of swissICT. The organizers are very happy to present the DINAcon Awards to 6 great projects in this extraordinary year 2020. The award ceremony will take place on Friday, October 23rd from 3 pm virtually via BigBlueButton.
Project Syn is on the award shortlist
Our Project Syn is one of six projects shortlisted for the DINAcon Awards 2020 in the category Newcomer. Keep your fingers crossed and watch our Project Syn preview video with Tobias Brunner:
Free of charge as a participant in the virtual DINAcon 2020
Those who want to participate spontaneously can order a free ticket. Have fun at DINAcon and see you soon!
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
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Aarno and Markus were invited to participate in the Swiss Digital Apéro Podcast and were interviewed by Philipp Meier of Red Hat on the topic of managed services. Under the headline “Why does VSHN rely on Red Hat in the Managed Service area” we were allowed to participate in our very first podcast and tell something about the history of VSHN and our cooperation with Red Hat. Many thanks to Red Hat and Tech Data for letting us participate in the podcast. Enjoy listening and let us know what you think of our first podcast attempt. 🙂
Listen to the Podcast (in German)
Aarno Aukia has founded the company VSHN more than 6 years ago, since now about 2 years Markus Speth accompanies him as CMO. The two “VSHNeers” are active in the areas of strategy, product development as well as sales & marketing and therefore responsible for the direction and growth of VSHN. The idea and motivation to stir up the Swiss hosting market with Red Hat as Managed Service Partner was put into action with the brand APPUiO – Swiss Container Platform. Today, a large number of companies already trust in this powerful cooperation and VSHN ensures the operation of various business critical applications, independent of industry, from fintech to software developers to public authorities. Spotify Apple Podcast
About VSHN – The DevOps Company
VSHN was founded with the intention to fundamentally shake up the hosting market. As a lean startup, we focused on the operation of IT platforms through automation, agility and a continuous improvement process. Completely independent of location and without our own hardware, we operate extensive applications according to the DevOps principle agile and 24/7 on any infrastructure, so that software developers can concentrate on their business and IT operations are relieved. VSHN (pronounced like “vision”) is the leading Swiss partner for DevOps, Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Rancher & 24/7 Cloud Operations. Learn more on www.vshn.ch
About APPUiO – Swiss Container Platform
APPUiO is the largest Swiss container platform for the design, development and operation of applications. Based on proven Open Source concepts such as Docker and Kubernetes, APPUiO enables DevOps: through automation and self-service, development, deployment and operational processes are accelerated and the collaboration between software developers and business organization is improved. APPUiO is a joint brand of VSHN und Puzzle ITC. Learn more on www.appuio.ch
Markus Speth
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Migrating OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) 3 to 4: learn about possible migration paths and why you should make the move to the new version of OpenShift.
Recap: what is OpenShift?
Red Hat OpenShift is a hybrid cloud, enterprise Kubernetes application platform for developers and business applications. OpenShift provides a secure and stable platform for container-based deployments without the need for big IT investments. This means that much needed legacy applications can be used alongside new cloud native and container-based ones. Red Hat OpenShift is a Kubernetes distribution. An extensive article with more details about Kubernetes and how Kubernetes compares to OpenShift can be found here. OpenShift consists of platform, application, and developer services. It is used to manage workloads, build cloud-native apps, and to boost the productivity of developers.
OpenShift 4 was introduced at the Red Hat Summit in May 2019. In this major release, Red Hat redefines Kubernetes for the enterprise through full stack automation. OpenShift 4 includes new technologies and functionality that results in self-managing, flexible, and automated clusters. New key elements of OpenShift 4 include:
Immutable Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS;
Operator framework;
OpenShift service mesh; and
Knative framework.
OpenShift 4 is Kubernetes at its core and in this release, Red Hat has completely re-architected how OpenShift is installed, upgraded and managed, introducing innovations such as Kubernetes Operators. Operators automate life cycle management of containerized applications with Kubernetes, and drives installation and upgrades of OpenShift and all of its services. This includes Kubernetes core services, along with Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch, software-configured networking, storage, registry and other components of the OpenShift Kubernetes platform. OpenShift 4 is an Operator-driven platform that delivers full-stack automation from top to bottom. OpenShift 4 also offers multiple cluster management across multiple clouds, and enables hybrid cloud services with Operators & OperatorHub. OpenShift 4 is designed to deliver a unified experience across hybrid cloud by driving automated installation and updates across Kubernetes deployments everywhere, all powered by Kubernetes Operators. OpenShift 4 is still built on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and delivered in a new immutable form as Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS. OpenShift 4 also brings a number of new developer services and capabilities needed to build cloud-native applications, to deploy them consistently across any supported on-premises, private, or public cloud infrastructure. Red Hat OpenShift 4 is Kubernetes for the Enterprise, designed to power businesses’ digital transformation, and to unite development teams on a single platform.
What are the advantages of migrating to OpenShift 4
OpenShift 3 will only be supported until 2021, so besides the need to migrate to the new version, we also think that OpenShift 4 brings many advantages for both operators and users. The level of maturity of operators leaves little to be desired. For the operation of a cluster, updates are much faster and at the same time, easier to handle and more stable. This also simplifies operations, as operators can react to changes and correct errors if needed. Operators are a new concept also for the operation of applications for users of OpenShift. The switch from Docker to Buildah for container builds now allows to build container images in a more secure way. This is a welcome innovation for all multitenant clusters, such as public platform providers and corporate clusters with multiple users. With the introduction of the OpenShift Service Mesh, developers in particular will gain new insights and new possibilities to visualize, secure and optimize the communication of their applications. OpenShift 4 represents a significant change in the way that OpenShift Container Platform clusters are deployed, managed, and developed upon. OpenShift 4 includes new technologies and functionality, for both developers and cluster administrators. Operators, Serverless, Service Mesh, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS), are all new to OpenShift 4. They are redefining what’s possible with the next generation of Kubernetes platforms. This technology shift enables clusters to self-manage functions previously performed by administrators, and empower developers to innovate on a consistent and stable platform that is simple to install and scale. The advantages of OpenShift 4 include:
Operators: implement and automate common Day-1 (installation, configuration, etc) and Day-2 (re-configuration, update, backup, failover, restore, etc.) activities in a piece of software running inside your OpenShift cluster, by integrating natively with Kubernetes concepts and APIs.
Red Hat Serverless: enables an application to consume only the compute resources necessary, scaling up or down automatically depending on usage. This removes the overhead of server provisioning and maintenance from the developer, letting them focus on application development instead.
Red Hat Service Mesh: controls how different parts of an application share data with one another through a built-in dedicated infrastructure layer. This visible infrastructure layer can track different parts of an app and their interactions, to optimize communications and to avoid downtime as it grows.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS: combines the ease of over-the-air updates from Container Linux with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernel, to deliver a more secure, easily managed container host.
OpenShift’s goal is to help developers to innovate more rapidly, to address the needs of the business quicker. Cloud native application development brings new challenges. As developers adopt microservice architectures, managing the communication between each service, securing those services and getting better service to service traceability to debug issues is an absolute necessity. These are the challenges that the Istio open source project seeks to address. The OpenShift 4 Service Mesh takes Istio and combines it with other key projects, like Jaeger for tracing and Kiali for visualization, to provide better manageability and traceability to microservices deployments. Developers can focus on building the business logic, letting the service mesh manage how each microservice communicates based on policies they define. They can also leverage the tracing and visualization capabilities to debug issues when they occur. Development approaches haven’t stopped evolving, and serverless is yet another way developers are looking to build applications, by leveraging function as a service based offerings. The Serverless model enables scaling down to zero, so as to only consume compute resources when functions execute. This can be an effective way to control operational costs, particularly in the public cloud. FaaS offerings were first pioneered by public cloud providers like AWS, but have the potential to lock your applications into a single cloud environment. This is why Red Hat is working to bring these capabilities to a hybrid cloud environment via Knative. Red Hat is an active member of the Knative open source project, collaborating with the Kubernetes community to drive upstream development that enables hybrid serverless capabilities. Using the Knative framework enabled in OpenShift, users can extend Kubernetes to build, deploy and manage serverless applications, supporting containerized and serverless deployments from a single Kubernetes control plane.
Who is OpenShift 4 for?
Almost a year after the initial release of OpenShift 4, we believe that OpenShift Container Platform 4 is ready for productive workloads. If you are currently running OpenShift 3, you have to evaluate and plan migrating to OpenShift 4. What are your options?
Do you want to run and operate OpenShift yourself?
This way you “keep full control” and you decide on every detail with all the implications
Do you have enough staff with the needed know-how to run OpenShift operations yourself 24/7? This might mean that you have to re-train your staff and also re-engineer all operations tools.
You might need to hire new people or train your existing staff.
External consultants might be needed for specific tasks such as the setup or migration part.
Or do you want to work with a partner who takes care of your OpenShift installation and ensure 24/7 operations?
Work with a hyperscaler like AWS/Azure/Google Cloud etc.:
You are super flexible, you can spin up your own cluster and the additional tools you need and you can do everything yourself “at a fingertip”
But you are also bound to one platform and you have to ensure the actual 24/7 management and operations
Work with a specialized partner like VSHN / APPUiO:
You can be sure that you have the latest OpenShift know-how and enough people who take care of your operations, both on premises or in any cloud of your choice.
A certified, Swiss based Red Hat partner who knows how to run OpenShift even in the most sensitive areas and industries such as banking & finance with a focus on the business-relevant application, not the “generic platform”
You get Managed OpenShift, 24/7 operations, additional Managed Services for a recurring monthly fee, at the end you save time & money so that your people can focus on developing your product and / or services.
At the end, it’s not a question of if, but when to migrate to OpenShift 4.
How to migrate from OpenShift 3 to OpenShift 4
There is no planned update path from OpenShift 3 to 4. Red Hat provides migration tools, however, that can migrate not only the Kubernetes resources, but also the data from persistent volumes, where S3 Storage is used as a cache. The migration tool supports migrations from version 3 to 4 as well as migrations between different OpenShift 4 clusters. According to the website openshift.com, the migration process from OpenShift 3 to 4 can be completed in 5 steps:
Spin up a new cluster running OpenShift 4.
Configure the new OpenShift 4 cluster.
Create a migration plan which includes how to handle data from the applications that are being migrated.
Run migration plan.
Move your DNS or Load-balancer configuration to your new cluster.
To successfully transition from OpenShift Container Platform 3 to OpenShift Container Platform 4, it is important that you review the following information:
Planning your transition: Learn about the differences between OpenShift Container Platform versions 3 and 4. Prior to transitioning, be sure that you have reviewed and prepared for storage, networking, logging, security, and monitoring considerations.
Performing your migration: Learn about and use the tools to perform your migration:
Control Plane Migration Assistance Tool (CPMA): the Control Plane Migration Assistance tool helps you configure the new cluster OpenShift 4 cluster that will be the destination for the applications that are being migrated from your existing OpenShift 3 cluster. This tool reduces the possibility for human error in the configuration process, matching when possible the existing settings in the source cluster. It also allows you to review the resources that will be applied to the new cluster.
Cluster Application Migration Tool (CAM): the Cluster Application Migration tool (CAM) migrates stateful and stateless applications from the source cluster on OpenShift 3 to a destination cluster running the latest OpenShift. It also can migrate applications between OpenShift 4 clusters. It is installed on your destination cluster via an Operator. Through the rich user interface take advantage of the simplified, customizable workflows. Decide which applications to start with and which migration approach best fits each application and your needs.
If you need detailed instructions about your OpenShift migration, head over to this page to learn more about the migration process and how to utilize the migration tooling. And of course, if you need help with your migration, we will be very happy to help you.
VSHN and APPUiO
VSHN is a Red Hat Advanced CCSP partner and we offer Managed OpenShift since 2016 through our brand APPUiO, both in the cloud of your choice or on premises. In 2020, we are operating OpenShift clusters for 350 customers and partners in 16 clouds around the globe. If you want to learn how we helped acrevis Bank in Switzerland with the move and how we operate OpenShift for them, check out our Success Story.
APPUiO OpenShift 4 Fact Sheet
Our APPUiO OpenShift Fact Sheet explains the benefits of OpenShift 4 in an easy to read 2-pager.
Download the Fact Sheet below.
OpenShift 4 Tech Labs
Join our free OpenShift 4 Tech Labs. Need help migrating and operating OpenShift 4? Contact us, we are here to help.
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
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WeAreDevelopers Live Week with Aarno & Adrian as speakers
2. Oct 2020
The recordings of the WeAreDevelopers Live Week 2020 sessions have been uploaded – enjoy watching below.
WeAreDevelopers Live Week Oct 5-9th 2020
It’s on again. Join us for the second edition of the WeAreDevelopers Live Week – with a jam-packed, all-online coding experience coming to you. Two VSHNeers are taking part with a talk, join us and “Welcome home, developers!”.
Aarno’s talk in the Security track
Monday, October 5th 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm (CEST) DevSecOps: Security in DevOps You managed to introduce an agile development and operations process to your team(s). And now? How can you add security to your DevOps and get to the next level? Join us on our journey and see the tools and processes we tried and learned to value. Listen to our experiences so you do not have to make all of them yourself.
Aarno Aukia, CTO & Co-founder of VSHN – The DevOps Company
Adrian’s talk in the DevOps track
Friday, October 9th 4:45 pm – 5:30 pm (CEST)
DevOps in the enterprise
DevOps is not the realm of startups or Silicon Valley giants only. What are the strategies to keep in mind when introducing DevOps to a company with a vast digital portfolio? And more important: How do you stick with it and deal with different release cycles?
Adrian Kosmaczewski, Developer Relations at VSHN AG
About WeAreDevelopers Live Week
Welcome to the second edition of the WeAreDevelopers Live Week. Join 12,000+ of the world’s brightest minds in software development to learn, share secrets and connect online from the comfort of your home – and for free. For 5 days, WeAreDevelopers will stream 5 tracks, consisting of hyper-focused coding sessions, hands-on workshops and live Q&A sessions to help take your skills to the next level. WeAreDevelopers Live Week is organized in cooperation with digitalswitzerland and Helvetia.
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
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As announced in our blog post, we are changing our corporate governance. After André Keller left the management and Marco Fretz joined with a strong focus on organizational development and daily operations, we are now taking the next step.
Markus Speth is a new member of the management of VSHN as of October 1st, 2020.
“I am extremely pleased to take on responsibility as a member of the management and to be able to influence the fate of VSHN even more. We have many ideas on how we can continue on the growth path for VSHN and how we can develop as an organization to focus even stronger on customers, partners and VSHNeers. Let’s do this together.”
– Markus
The new management structure will have a strong focus on people, organizational development (OrgDev) and the refining of the strategy set by the board.
Markus is very much looking forward to be a member of the management and to being a driving force behind VSHN, playing a key role in its further growth and mastering future challenges.
Markus joined VSHN in July 2018 as Chief Marketing Officer. In addition to the daily business as Squad Master of our SOL Squad (Sales & Marketing) he is responsible for marketing and growth as well as partners and strategic topics.
In his role als CMO, Markus is responsible for all activities that VSHN carries out to promote and sell its services. From now on he will represent these important aspects of the corporate governance in the management.
“I have had the opportunity to experience several stations in my professional career, but VSHN clearly stands out from the crowd. What I particularly like is the way we deal and communicate with each other, be it with customers and partners or the VSHNeers with each other. We all meet as equals and everyone is heard. There is no boss / employee or customer / supplier relationship that has a great potential for conflict. Each VSHNeer can contribute to any topic and develop topics independently and our customers are partners who appreciate VSHN as “extended arm of software development”.
I have never experienced this in this form before and I am looking forward to shaping this culture together for many more years to come.”
– Markus
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
Latest news
Codey
General
Codey is Live: New Features & Lock In Your Price Until April 30th
“swiss hosting” was developed by swiss made software to create comparability and a reference to Swissness in the field of hosting & cloud. swiss hosting is a transparency label that guarantees data sovereignty, because in addition to the provider’s place of business, the cloud or data center and hardware must be in Switzerland and may not belong to any foreign company. swiss made software is the nationally and internationally recognized flagship for Swiss quality in software development. More than 650 companies have been awarded the label “swiss made software”. This corresponds to more than 12,000 employees in the core ICT industry in Switzerland.
Requirements of the swiss hosting label
The following criteria must be met in order to use the “swiss hosting” label:
Business location in Switzerland
Hosting in a Swiss data center. Data protection and data security must be subject to Swiss law.
Protection of the hosting environment against access from abroad
swiss hosting at VSHN: the customer decides
As a Swiss company with the option to host data exclusively in Swiss clouds & data centers, we are now the proud bearer of the “swiss hosting” label. We are clearly committed to Swissness and support the idea of “swiss hosting” to create comparability among the various hosting providers. Since VSHN itself does not operate any infrastructure or cloud, the “swiss hosting” label for VSHN is only valid in connection with a Swiss cloud or data center provider. With our APPUiO Public offering we can ensure swiss hosting because the platform is operated in the cloud of our friends at cloudscale.ch and the data is therefore hosted in a Swiss data center. Another example would be APPUiO Managed on Swisscom DCS. If customers choose a Swiss data location and the corresponding cloud or data center provider meets the criteria, the “swiss hosting” label can be guaranteed. For many of our Swiss customers, the Swissness and data location Switzerland is still an important factor. Especially for business critical applications and the processing of sensitive data, location and data sovereignty are of central importance. The “swiss hosting” label underlines this quality claim.
About VSHN – The DevOps Company
VSHN (pronounced ˈvɪʒn like “vision”) is Switzerland’s leading DevOps, Docker, Kubernetes and 24/7 cloud operations partner. VSHN was founded with the intention to fundamentally shake up the hosting market. As a lean startup, we have focused on operating IT platforms through automation, agility and a continuous improvement process. Completely location-independent and without our own hardware, we operate extensive applications according to the DevOps principle agilely and 24/7 on every infrastructure, so that software developers can concentrate on their business and IT operations are relieved.
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
Latest news
Codey
General
Codey is Live: New Features & Lock In Your Price Until April 30th
We’re very happy to announce Red Hat OpenShift 4 services on APPUiO!
The whole VSHN team has been working hard on making OpenShift 4 a reality for our customers. We are fully committed on the strategic importance of our Red Hat partnership and OpenShift as a main pillar of APPUiO and VSHN services.
OpenShift 4 on APPUiO beta program
To celebrate this milestone we’re happy to provide the community with time-limited OpenShift 4 test accounts, at no charge except for one thing: your feedback. If you are interested in testing OpenShift 4 on APPUiO, please sign up here for our beta program:
Do you want to shape the future of APPUiO Managed OpenShift 4? Send us your feedback! To make it easier, we use a feedback voting system, where you can easily join the discussion and vote for your preferred features and services.
History of OpenShift & VSHN
OpenShift has been and continues to be the strategic Kubernetes platform for VSHN. VSHN was founded in 2014 with the idea of not doing everything ourselves, but rather focus on what we do best: Specialize in operating and onboarding customers and don’t own hardware, servers or data centers is one of the main aspects of why we exist. This led to a strong focus on innovation & automation, PaaS & container technology with the belief of being cloud native & cloud neutral. Shortly after in 2015, we created the brand APPUiO in cooperation with Puzzle ITC, and started deploying the first OpenShift 3 beta releases. In close collaboration with Puzzle ITC and Red Hat we launched APPUiO.ch container platform in production in 2016. Why did we choose OpenShift? A couple of arguments why OpenShift is our “way to go”:
Multitenancy, RBAC, WebGUI, container based images, “best of both PaaS and CaaS”
Delivery model: open source, available & supports both cloud/hyperscalers and on-premises/CCSP-infrastructure
Red Hat: trusted brand, marketing generating demand, customers ask for Red Hat
Flexibility fits perfect to our strategy & managed service business
Perfect for our future growth and open source practice
OpenShift enabled us to enter the Enterprise market through:
Enabling DevSecOps through RBAC and other security-by-default
Enterprise supported Kubernetes
Embracing open standards, enabling infrastructure/cloud abstraction and mobility, enabling cloud-native (and not necessarily cloud-only)
So the foundation for VSHN and APPUiO was set up which led to a strong & healthy natural growth through focus on what we do best. In 2020, we are still open & transparent and are embracing Open Source & partnerships, are still owner-run and managed and are ISO27001 certified and ISAE3402 audited. VSHN is the first Swiss Kubernetes Certified Service Provider (KCSP) and VSHN is Red Hat Advanced Business Partner (CCSP). So after using OpenShift since 3.0 beta 1, today we are operating 50 clusters in 16 countries. From Zurich to Sydney, the USA and China, numerous happy customers trust us in the banking, financial services, insurance brokering, medical insurance, medical, governmental, and many other online business fields. Our customers embrace Enterprise Kubernetes features such as multi-tenancy, authentication, and security hardening, in combination with the “batteries included” approach to auxiliary services: container building, logging, and metrics. OpenShift 4 includes a lot more features complementing this offering, bringing lots of value to our customers.
A container platform changes the way we develop, deliver and operate software. APPUiO presents OpenShift 4 in a Techlab: a free half day training course.
Target audience
The OpenShift Techlab is for anyone who wants to understand how a containerized application can be deployed and run on OpenShift.
