Just like in previous years, we would like to know about the current state of DevOps in Switzerland. 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 April 27th, 2023, and may be shared, forwarded, and retweeted with your peers. It will only take about 5 minutes of your time.
Why should you take part?
Six years after our first check on DevOps in Switzerland, it is time to take a closer look at its current state and adoption in 2023.
We will send each participant an (of course, anonymized) report, “DevOps in Switzerland 2023” upon request, in which we compare this year’s results with those of last year 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.
And just like last year, we have a prize draw! If you enter your details at the end, you’ll automatically enter a prize draw for one (1) Digitec / Galaxus voucher of 200 CHF or one (1) APPUiO Cloud voucher worth 200 CHF! We will contact the two winners privately and separately on Friday, April 28th, 2023. The terms and conditions are available.
Help us determine the current state of DevOps in Switzerland! Please take part in our study and tell us about your experience with DevOps and what role DevOps plays in your business.
We are already very excited to learn about results and trends. Thank you in advance for your participation!
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
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Just like in 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017, here is our review of all the things that happened in and around VSHN during 2022.
It’s time to take a look back at the year 2022 and reflect on the events and developments that have shaped the world. It’s been a year of incredible change, an ongoing pandemic, climate crisis and of course a terrible war in Europe resulting in an energy crisis not seen before and ongoing economic uncertainty.
The past year was marked by the war in Ukraine, causing significant geopolitical and economic uncertainty, as well as the fear of a potential economic recession. Layoffs in big tech companies also became a reality and affected many professionals in the industry. We saw companies laying off thousands of people which would have been unthinkable only a year ago.
But we also saw the rise of AI with Dall-E mini and ChatGPT as actual first real-world examples of what AI or ML are capable of. We also saw an ongoing accelerated shift to cloud-based solutions, and we’ve seen a huge increase in the number of companies moving their infrastructure and applications to the cloud.
All in all, it’s been a year of rapid change and challenges. We’re excited to see what the future holds, but also aware of the need to be prepared for the unforeseen. We’re looking forward to continuing to work with our customers and partners to help them navigate the rapidly evolving technology landscape and achieve their goals.
Thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to working with you in 2023.
In terms of home office vs. office, we have a strong new addition to actually go to the office. It’s called VSHNtower and it’s our newest office space in Neugasse 6 on the top floor. Check out yourself and join us for a coffee or beer there. 🙂
Our open employee handbook grew quite a lot since we started it and we received very positive feedback. There are even companies and friends of VSHN using parts of it for themselves and also for people interested in joining VSHN, it’s a great help before your first interview and to get some insights on how we work as an organization.
VSHN strategy & product focus
After agreeing on our Key Drivers and Key Deliverables, we figured out that we as VSHN want to focus even more on Cloud Native Software and want to become the trusted Service Provider for companies that need to run software and be the best partner for Software Developers and System Engineers to help them in their daily tasks. We have also set our Company Focus for 2023 to guide us in this process.
Our Kubernetes First Strategy is well on the way and lots of initiatives have been kickstarted recently. One of the already visible products are APPUiO Cloud and AppCat (ApplicationCatalog) and VSHN AppFlow and VSHN AppOps will become the new cornerstone of VSHN.
New products APPUiO Cloud & VSHN AppCat
APPUiO Cloud is our Namespace-as-a-Service offering based on Red Hat OpenShift 4, check out our behind the scenes blog post. In particular, Project Syn enabled the automation of many different tasks in APPUiO Cloud. And of course it is all 100% Open Source, as is the APPUiO Cloud Commodore Component.
VSHN AppFlow and VSHN AppOps will be the new cornerstone of VSHN together with VSHN AppCat and the existing and already well-know APPUiO product suite. You can see a first outlook in our Product Portfolio.
All of this implies a certain change in our organization and team structure. With this move, we want to focus even more on running our customers’ applications and organize VSHN’s different business units to deliver value end-to-end most effectively. In doing so, our main goal will be to have as few dependencies as possible between our teams and to find the best way to further develop the required expertise in all areas of VSHN, both for our customers and for the continuous personal development of our VSHNeers.
We also improved our product docs and want to get even better in documenting for our customers and partners.
Are you interested in VSHN AppOps and AppFlow? Please contact us, we’re happy to discuss your needs.
We are happy to inform you about our opening hours during Christmas 2022 and New Year. Of course, we will also ensure smooth platform operation over the holidays this year.
We are available for you the next 2 weeks as follows:
Dec 26 2022: holiday
Dec 27 – 30 2022: 9.00am to 6.00pm
Jan 2 2023: holiday
Jan 3 – 6 2023: 9.00am to 6.00pm
Of course, our customers with 24/7 Support Plan Priority also enjoy our support day and night on Christmas and New Year in case of emergency.
VSHN AG and all VSHNeers wish everyone a wonderful, reflective and successful holiday season! See you soon and already now a great new year 2023!
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
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VSHN is Red Hat Premier CCSP Partner in Switzerland
23. Nov 2022
Zurich, 22.11.22 VSHN is Red Hat Premier CCSP Partner in Switzerland.
VSHN is very pleased to announce that we have been named the first Red Hat Premier CCSP Business Partner in Switzerland as part of the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider (CCSP) program. This provides customers and independent software vendors (ISVs) with greater confidence in building their next-generation IT projects with Red Hat solutions. As a Red Hat Premier Business Partner, VSHN has demonstrated that we are a competent business partner with a significant focus on Red Hat-related projects. Red Hat Premier Business Partners are well trained and committed to working closely with Red Hat on business opportunities.
This recognition of VSHN as a Red Hat Premier Business Partner within the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider Program underscores its close collaboration with Red Hat and its partner ecosystem to provide impactful solutions and cloud services to organizations in the region.
Red Hat OpenShift helps support VSHN’s Kubernetes First Strategy and product portfolio. With VSHN AppOps, VSHN offers a best-matching hosting environment for applications by combining VSHN expertise and best practices with products like VSHN AppFlow, APPUiO Managed, APPUiO Cloud and services from the VSHN Application Catalog. With APPUiO Cloud, VSHN offers a first instant on, pay per use, self service and multi cloud product that follows the approach of Namespace-as-a-Service based on Red Hat OpenShift. APPUiO Cloud provides instant access to a shared, fully-managed, ready to use Red Hat OpenShift clusters in just a few minutes, so customers can more easily bring ideas into production by focusing on applications rather than setting up or managing clusters. APPUiO Cloud is designed for Cloud Native App Development, MVP, DevOps & CI/CD Pipelines, Machine Learning, Production App Hosting, Mobile App Backends and much more. Customers can try APPUiO Cloud for free and find more details are available here.
Cloud provider models have expanded beyond multi-tenant public clouds to include private cloud build-outs, Linux container-based infrastructure and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions, and the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program was created to offer additional flexibility to help solution providers better meet customer needs for cloud-based Red Hat technologies. By using a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider, customers and partners using custom-developed or third-party ISV applications certified to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other Red Hat solutions can have greater confidence that these applications will function as expected when using them on a public cloud or managed service provider.
Red Hat’s Certified Cloud and Service Provider designation is awarded to Red Hat partners following validation by Red Hat. Each provider must meet testing and certification requirements to demonstrate that they can deliver a scalable, supported and consistent environment with strong security features designed for enterprise cloud deployments. The globally-unified program provides customers, ISVs, and partners with the confidence that Red Hat product experts have validated a given solution so that implementations can begin with a solid foundation.
Supporting Quotes
Sandhya Prabhu, senior manager, Partner Ecosystem, Switzerland, Red Hat
“Red Hat’s partner ecosystem is a vital component in delivering powerful, flexible and open solutions to global enterprises. We’re pleased to work with VSHN as a Red Hat Premier Business Partner to offer customers and developers broad choice in the cloud and better enable users to build and deploy cloud-native applications.”
Markus Speth, CEO, VSHN – The DevOps Company
“We are very excited to announce that VSHN is one of the first Red Hat Premier Business Partners within the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider Program in Switzerland. On a worldwide scale, this puts us among a select group of Red Hat Premier Business Partners. With this recognition, VSHN demonstrates our strong collaboration with Red Hat and the Red Hat ecosystem to provide cloud solutions and services to our customers to make their lives easier.
Of course, we also would like to thank all our VSHNeers who helped us to achieve this new recognition through various certifications, accreditations and continued belief in Red Hat. We are looking forward to continuing our successful collaboration with Red Hat.”
VSHN is Switzerland’s leading partner for DevOps, Container & Kubernetes. VSHN (pronounced like “vision”) 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 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.
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Markus Speth
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VSHNday 2022: Limited support availability on 2022-11-30
15. Nov 2022
Every year all VSHNeers take a day off from the daily business, to meet and shape the future of VSHN on what we call the “VSHNday.”
VSHNday 2022 will take place on Wednesday, November 30th, 2022. For this reason, on that day VSHN will only be available for incident handling. We will keep an eye on incident tickets, and answer the technical support phone number. Our OnCall service is not affected.
Aarno Aukia
Aarno is Co-Founder of VSHN AG and provides technical enthusiasm as a Service as CTO.
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We have been awarded the kununu Top Company 2022 seal, placing us among the top 5% of the most popular companies on kununu.
This puts us among very few companies that meet all applicable requirements to receive this great award. A big thank you to all our VSHNeers for their honest comments and reviews.
What makes this award special is the fact that it is awarded on the basis of employee reviews and ratings on the company profile. The data-based and independent awarding of the seal ensures an authentic assessment of the company.
Our company embraces openness and transparency, has a flat hierarchy and is organized in Domains for which self-organized Teams are accountable for. This concept comes from Sociocracy 3.0 (S3) which isn’t an organization form nor a model, it’s a collection of principles and patterns we adapt to our needs where useful.
VSHN’s transparent and appreciative corporate culture, an agile organization and the opportunity to shape one’s work in a self-determined manner are, in our view, the basic prerequisites for this. If you want to learn more, have a look at our completely open and publicly available employee handbook. and our employee benefits.
kununu is Europe’s leading platform for employer reviews. The criteria for awarding the “Top Company” seal have been redefined and the criteria tightened in 2021 so that companies have to meet even higher and additional requirements than with the old seals. According to a survey by the consulting firm Employer Telling, kununu’s “Top Company” seal is the best-known employer seal among job seekers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Since 2015, kununu has been awarding a seal of approval to companies that are rated particularly well by employees.
We are very proud and happy that VSHN is Top Company 2022! If you would like to join our team and also become a VSHNeer, go to our careers page.
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
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It’s about time to give all of you a short update on what we at VSHN are working on and where we want to lay our focus in the coming months.
Our open employee handbook grew quite a lot since we started it and we received very positive feedback. There are even companies and friends of VSHN using parts of it for themselves and also for people interested in joining VSHN, it’s a great help before your first interview and to get some insights on how we work as an organization.
At that point, we want to thank every VSHNeer for their contribution to our handbook.
VSHN Canada
After our initial VSHN goes to Canada video and quite a delay due to the pandemic, we are happy to announce that VSHN is finally present in Vancouver, Canada.
The idea behind this is a “follow the sun strategy” to make use of different timezones in order to reduce night shifts for our VSHNeers here in Switzerland.
Matthias Indermühle will lead VSHN Canada and together with Tobias Nehrlich and Sandro Kaspar, 3 experienced VSHNeers will be located in Vancouver in the next months to start operations and hiring there.
The VSHN board has appointed Marco Fretz as additional General Manager. The VSHN management now consists of 3 General Managers (“Geschäftsführer”), namely Marco Fretz (COO), Tobias Brunner (CTO) and Markus Speth (CEO), as well as Matthias Indermühle as Member of the Management of VSHN AG in Switzerland and CEO of VSHN Canada. Formerly, Tobias and Markus shared the CEO role as Co-CEOs, but Tobias wants to focus again more on technical aspects while Markus will focus on the exterior, if you want to know more details how the VSHN management is organized, visit this handbook page. We believe that with this setup, we have the force and experience needed to take VSHN to the next level.
The VSHN board has also appointed an additional board member with Till Bay, CEO of Comerge, an experienced entrepreneur and long time customer of VSHN to strengthen our outside view. The VSHN board now consists of Till Bay, Aarno Aukia, Patrick Mathers and Bruce Mathers as Chairman of the Board.
Kubernetes First Strategy and APPUiO Cloud
Our Kubernetes First Strategy is well on the way and lots of initiatives have been kickstarted recently. One of the already visible products is APPUiO Cloud.
APPUiO Cloud is our Namespace-as-a-Service offering based on Red Hat OpenShift 4, check out our behind the scenes blog post.
APPUiO Cloud has been possible thanks to the incredible experience of the VSHN team and to their investment in tooling.
In particular, Project Syn enabled the automation of many different tasks in APPUiO Cloud. And of course it is all 100% Open Source, as is the APPUiO Cloud Commodore Component.
We also improved our product docs and want to get even better in documenting for our customers and partners.
Outlook: VSHN AppOps and AppFlow
After agreeing on our Key Drivers and Key Deliverables, we figured out that we as VSHN want to focus even more on Cloud Native Software and want to become the trusted Service Provider for companies that need to run software and the best partner for Software Developers and System Engineers to help them in their daily tasks.
You can see a first outlook in our Product Portfolio, namely VSHN AppFlow and VSHN AppOps will be the new cornerstone of VSHN together with VSHN AppCat and the existing and already well-know APPUiO product suite.
All of this implies a certain change in our organization and team structure, which will follow in the coming months. With this move, we want to focus even more on running our customers’ applications and organize VSHN’s different business units to deliver value end-to-end most effectively. In doing so, our main goal will be to have as few dependencies as possible between our teams and to find the best way to further develop the required expertise in all areas of VSHN, both for our customers and for the continuous personal development of our VSHNeers.
VSHNtower offices in Zurich
In terms of home office vs. office, we have a strong new addition to actually go to the office. It’s called VSHNtower and it’s our newest office space in Neugasse 6 on the top floor.
It used to be Kuoni’s (the travel company) executive board room and we now use it as common room, for events, meetups or to just have a beautiful view over our home town, Zurich.
We are thrilled to announce the third edition of our “DevOps in Switzerland” report!
From January to March 2022 we conducted a study to learn how Swiss companies implement and apply DevOps principles.
We compiled the results into a PDF file (only available in English), and just like in the previous edition, we provided a short summary of our findings in the first pages.
You can get the report on our website. Enjoy reading and we look forward to your feedback!
Aarno Aukia
Aarno is Co-Founder of VSHN AG and provides technical enthusiasm as a Service as CTO.
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The winners of the DevOps Study 2022 have been determined
8. Apr 2022
With the DevOps in Switzerland Study 2022 we have introduced a raffle. We raffled prizes among every participant of the survey who entered their data and here are the winners:
(1) Digitec / Galaxus voucher value 200 CHF
Winner: Tobias Läderach
(1) APPUiO Cloud voucher value 200 CHF
Winner: Marco Lucarelli
Congratulations to both of you!
We have already notified the two winners and wish them lots of fun with their prizes.
Many thanks to the winners and all other participants of the DevOps Study 2022. We are now working at full speed on the DevOps Report and will publish it again as usual on vshn.ch.
Markus Speth
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Just like in 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017, here is our review of all the things that happened in VSHN during 2021!
We would like to start by thanking all of our VSHNeers for their hard work and support during the complicated times of last year, the second of a global pandemic that has had a deep impact in our transformation into a full remote organization, at least for the time being. And we would like to extend this big thank you to our partners, who have trusted us with their applications and infrastructure to keep them working 24/7 during these same complicated times.
Let’s begin our review!
Big News
We started 2021, the year of our 7th anniversary, with big news: Tobias Brunner and Markus Speth assumed the role of co-CEOs, and as part of their new leadership, they announced our Kubernetes-First Strategy, setting VSHN at the forefront of the Cloud Native industry.
And to celebrate, we inaugurated a new, faster, and more modern website in February!
New VSHNeers
In 2021, a record 13 new members joined our team, for a total of almost 50 VSHNeers; in order of arrival, they are: Adrian, Stephan, Sören, Virag, Fabian, Łukasz, Raphael, Ramón, Sebastian, Kathryn, Andrew, Robin, and Dawn. We are thrilled to have you on board!
Business Highlights
One of the most important business highlights of 2021 was our success in the OCRE tender, with which VSHN and Exoscale became selected cloud providers in the catalog for European universities and research institutions. We hosted a webinar for Restena.lu highlighting the major aspects of our collaboration with Exoscale, and another one about Quantum Computing together with ParityQC.
2021 was a fruitful year in collaborations with our partners, old and new. Take a look!
Isovalent
We were thrilled to announce a partnership with Isovalent, the company behind Cilium, the Enterprise-class eBPF-powered Networking, Observability, and Security software, which was contributed to the CNCF as an incubation-level project in 2021.
Following our great collaboration, Richard Zobrist, back then Head of Partners & Alliances Switzerland, now Country Manager Switzerland at Red Hat, published a very interesting guest post in our blog: The 5 Most Persistent Myths about Container Technologies.
Following GitLab’s ascendant success journey, as they join the stock market in New York City, we hosted our first and second GitLab Switzerland Meetups with great interest from the community.
We are very glad to continue our collaboration with Crossplane, particularly as we continue our work on Project Syn.
On the Press
This year we were interviewed quite a few times in the specialist IT press: for example, Patrick Mathers was interviewed by startup.info; we made up places in this year’s edition of the ComputerWorld Top 500, ranking now in the 384th place this year; we are a Top Ten Open Source contributor according to various benchmarks; and finally we were interviewed in the French-speaking Cominmag podcast!
Have you seen the new Commodore Components Hub? As we continue our work on Project Syn, we found out that many others in the open source community were creating Commodore components, and we created a portal to show them all. Check it out!
VSHN HackDays
Speaking about the Commodore Components Hub, did you know that it is a direct product of the new VSHN HackDays initiative? Twice last year, during two days each in June and October, VSHNeers brainstormed and brought new ideas to life. Lots of innovations were born during those days, and we plan on hosting more of these HackDays in 2022!
Technical Blog Posts
Our VSHNeers have been busy at work and and writing about it; here’s a list of blog posts written by them about the various things we do in our day-to-day activities:
The pandemic didn’t stop us from appearing in various events and conferences all over the world, and even organizing our own! Here’s a quick summary of the most important ones.
Adrian Kosmaczewski gave a speech at GIDS Live 2021 (happening online but originally from Bangalore, India) called “Managing Kubernetes Clusters as Cattle with Project Syn”.
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 March 31st, 2022 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 2022 Survey.
Why should you take part?
Five 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 2022. 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.
And this year we have a prize draw! If you enter your personal details at the end, you’ll automatically enter a prize draw for one (1) Digitec / Galaxus voucher of 200 CHF or one (1) APPUiO Cloud voucher worth 200 CHF! We will contact the two winners privately and separately on Friday, April 1st, 2022 (no April Fools’ Day joke, pretty promise!) The terms and conditions are available.
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.
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:
12/24/2021: 9:00am to 4:00pm
12/31/2021: 9:00am to 4:00pm
From Monday, January 3 2022 we are back recovered and ready for you from 9:00 am to 6:00 pm.
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 2022!
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
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VSHN introduces additional vacation days for each year of service
20. Dec 2021
We currently offer our VSHNeers 5 weeks of vacation (25 days) per year. That’s cool and already 5 days more than Swiss law requires (at least for VSHNeers over 20).
We all know how important it is to take a break from a stressful workday. How important it is to spend time with family and friends or just your hobby.
We want to provide all VSHNeers with the time they need to recover from work and stay healthy, while also recognizing years of service.
One additional vacation day per year of service
Each VSHNeer will be credited with one additional vacation day per work year at VSHN beginning January 2022.
Example: a VSHNeer starts on July 1, 2021 with 25 vacation days. From July 1, 2022, they receive 26 days, and so on.
This adds up to a maximum total of 35 vacation days and is calculated retroactively from the start date. Example: a VSHNeer who started on July 1, 2019, will now have 27 days of vacation instead of 25.
So all VSHNeers will receive one additional vacation day per year of service, the vacation day will be added at the date of the annual wage increase.
Practical example Sociocracy 3.0 at VSHN
By the way, this is a perfect example of how we actively live Sociocracy 3.0 at VSHN. In June 2021, the idea came up to reward long-time employees and to create an additional incentive to work for VSHN. After discussions in the responsible VSHNeers Delegate Circle, a first proposal was created, refined and now already implemented.
You can also find more information about Sociocracy 3.0 in our handbook.
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
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The 5 Most Persistent Myths about Container Technologies
28. Sep 2021
Guest article by Richard Zobrist, Head of Partners & Alliances Switzerland, Red Hat.
Open-source container technologies are an important measure to protect data. Despite this, some companies consider container solutions to be too insecure, too difficult to integrate, too slow, or completely unnecessary. It’s high time to dispel these persistent myths.
1. Too little security
Security teams are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the changing risks, compliance requirements, tools, and architectural changes introduced by new technologies such as containers, Kubernetes, software-defined infrastructure, and cloud technologies.
However, to be successful in the long term, security professionals need to change the way they think about containers: they are not virtual machines (VMs) or hosts, and they bring with them changing security challenges that cannot be addressed with traditional tools. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform enables users to combine open-source benefits with the stability and security of a managed product. In addition, Red Hat OpenShift provides more consistent security over the long term, integrated monitoring, centralized policy management, and compatibility with Kubernetes workloads. Red Hat OpenShift can increase security by providing faster software updates that close security gaps-without you having to be actively involved.
2. Too difficult to integrate
Another myth that persists unwaveringly is the “difficult integration” of open source applications. The explanation for this is that today’s IT landscapes often offer few interfaces to which open-source platforms can dock. However, in this year’s “Open Source Study Switzerland” published by the University of Bern, the main reason cited for using open software is precisely the open standards on which open source is based. This shows that interoperability is central today and that monolithic IT systems have had their day. Business applications are expected to have open interfaces via application programming interfaces, which could be used to exchange microservices data, for example.
3. Lack of expertise
Many companies have a common concern: How can they benefit from open source technologies even if they don’t have their own specialist staff? What solutions are there in concrete terms? And what are the hurdles to overcome? To migrate your applications to Red Hat OpenShift, you don’t need additional staff. You can either work directly with Red Hat or let a certified partner – such as VSHN – do the migration.
Red Hat OpenShift gives you the added benefit of an energetic and supportive community behind the scenes with which to share knowledge and experience. In the dynamic world of IT, this access to knowledgeable professionals is one of the most important reasons for using open-source software. In addition, the dissemination of open source know-how also creates the basis for professional support and ultimately the possibility of hiring experienced open source specialists directly. Thus, open-source becomes a trump card in the battle for IT talent, because the technology makes companies attractive to them.
4. All applications must be based on open source
More and more companies are transforming their business by adopting DevOps principles, microservices, and container technologies like Kubernetes. Red Hat OpenShift is nevertheless often accused of having too few interfaces to other systems and only being successful if all applications are based on open source technologies. The “Open Source Study Switzerland”, on the other hand, shows that an important reason for using Red Hat OpenShift is the enormous selection of freely available components and tools. In recent years, a significant ecosystem has formed around OpenShift, from which customers can benefit in the simplest way. Since IT decisions are often based on what others are doing, the popularity of open-source software multiplies as it becomes more widely used.
5. Unclear business model of the providers
To put an end to this myth as well, it is worth taking a look back at the beginnings of open source technologies. A milestone in open source history was the publication of the first version of the Linux kernel by the Finnish computer scientist Linus Torvalds. With the invention of Linux, Torvalds succeeded in developing the first completely free operating system for computers and thus laid the foundation not only for a large developer community but also for numerous projects and distributions based on the Linux kernel, such as “Red Hat Enterprise Linux”. As a result, the spread and popularity of Linux and other free software in the corporate world grew steadily, whether it was software for servers, office programs for desktop PCs, or virtualization tools for cloud platforms.
With the “Leading with Containers” initiative, Red Hat supports both its own customers and its partners in the introduction of “Red Hat OpenShift“. Customers who want to benefit from Red Hat’s container technology via a partner – such as VSHN – receive the same advantages as Red Hat’s own customers. Because VSHN has been a recognized Advanced Partner of Red Hat for over 3 years, specializing in the area of “Certified Cloud & Service Provider” (CCSP).
Richard Zobrist
Head of Partners & Alliances Switzerland and (interim) Country Manager Austria at Red Hat
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VSHNday 2021: Limited support availability on 2021-09-24
10. Sep 2021
Every year all VSHNeers take a day off from the daily business, to meet and shape the future of VSHN on what we call the “VSHNday.”
VSHNday 2021 will take place on Friday, September 24th, 2021. For this reason, on that day VSHN will only be available for incident handling. We will keep an eye on incident tickets, and answer the technical support phone number. Our OnCall service is not affected.
Aarno Aukia
Aarno is Co-Founder of VSHN AG and provides technical enthusiasm as a Service as CTO.
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I’m Sebastian and I’m joining team Tarazed as a System Engineer.
In the last few years, I worked as a software engineer on proprietary log management and monitoring software. Loads of work went into managing and keeping the appliances updated at the customer site, often in air-gapped environments. This gave me the full full-stack experience (almost the full IT department experience) from managing a Linux distribution to fine-tuning application performance in environments with 100+ milliseconds input latency.
In my time off I love to spend time on my mountain bike (and talk about mountain biking 😉). If my bike is broken or there is more than half a meter of snow, I enjoy ski touring, hiking, and nerding about coffee and cooking.
I’m looking forward to meeting all the new people here at VSHN and finding great solutions to complex problems.
Sebastian
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
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On June 24 and 25 2021, the first VSHN internal HackDay took place and it was a huge success.
The event was open to all VSHNeers who were interested to break out of the daily business and work on cool and fun stuff.
Organisation & execution of the HackDay
We decided that topics should be split into work groups consisting of 1-2 people. The topics were collected beforehand in our forum and VSHNeers could either join a topic or bring in their own ideas.
We agreed on having this HackDay remote (which might change for the next edition) via Mibo which was also a lot of fun.
After a quick kick-off meeting in Mibo on the first day, the groups organized themselves and started to work on their topics. All attendees got a lunch voucher to order food and to have at least lunch together remotely.
At 5.00pm on the first day, we met again on Mibo to have an Apéro (which was also delivered to our doorsteps via bierliebe.ch) and to discuss the findings of the first day.
The next morning, the groups met again and continued their work. After another nice lunch break, we met all again in Mibo at 4.00pm for the presentations. Every group had 5mins to present their work, which was also a lot of fun because even in the virtual world, some VSHNeers had problems with the beamer and their presentations. 🙂
Topics & groups
We had an awesome choice of interesting topics ranging from evaluating a new recruiting and HR tool (for the not-so technical VSHNeers), managing GitHub Orgs with code, Commodore component hub and ModuleSync.
Here’s the topics overview:
New Recruiting Tool & Research “Human Resources” Tools
Commodore Component Hub
Experiment with OAM and KubeVela
Credit card payment for VSHN services
VSHN Reservationtool for shared desks
create offers in Hubspot
Container Image Cache
ModuleSync
Publish Commodore to PyPI
Manage GitHub Orgs with Code
Simple http/tcp/udp endpoint and uptime monitoring
Choosing the winner
After each group presented their outcome of the work done during the HackDay, we had to choose a winner. Everyone had one vote and we voted via Mentimeter which was a lot of fun as we had a draw after the first voting round and had to vote again for the remaining 3 ideas.
The winner team “VSHN Reservationtool for shared desks” received a prize of CHF 250.00 per person to spend in Swibeco (our employee benefits program) and of course received a lot of glory and honor 🎉.
We are all looking forward to our next VSHN HackDay!
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
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VSHN – The DevOps Company announces Kubernetes First strategy. While KubeCon & CloudNativeCon Europe 2021 is taking place, the leading partner for DevOps & container platforms in Switzerland is fully committing to Kubernetes.
VSHN – The DevOps Company gears up for ‘Kubernetes First’ strategy
VSHN is strategically focussing on Kubernetes services. With “Kubernetes First”, the company sets their product & solution strategy on Kubernetes to be at the forefront of technical innovation. This includes cloud native technologies and container platforms and culminates in VSHN’s own Open Source offerings ‘Project Syn’ to run and operate your application and a fleet of Kubernetes clusters as well as ‘K8up’, the Kubernetes backup operator. VSHN manages the infrastructure but does not own any servers or data centers with Kubernetes enabling to standardize both cloud and cloud native onprem.
VSHN is the First Swiss Kubernetes Certified Service Provider
To lay the foundation for Kubernetes First, VSHN has been awarded the first Swiss Kubernetes Certified Service Provider (KCSP) by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation already in 2019 and has deepened its partnerships with strategic software vendors, cloud providers and hyperscalers such as IBM/Red Hat, SUSE/Rancher, Upbound/Crossplane, GitLab, F5/NGINX, Amazon Web Services AWS, A1/Exoscale and Swisscom.
During KubeCon & CloudNativeCon Europe 2021, Tobias Brunner is holding a Lightning Talk at the Crossplane Community Day Europe on May 4th 2021.
In addition to the extended partnerships, VSHN is increasingly hiring and training Kubernetes experts and expanding its managed container platform offering APPUiO.ch in collaboration with Puzzle ITC and also expanding certifications such as ISO 27001, ISAE3402 Type 2 and vendor specific certifications. In total, investments sum-up to a six digit CHF amount for the expansion and development of Kubernetes services.
“Everything is becoming cloud and Kubernetes is the operating system of the cloud. The trick is to focus on what you do best in a highly competitive market and not trying to do everything yourself, such as operating your own data centers. There are already a vast amount of experts for this and we are the experts of running your Kubernetes platform on any cloud or in any data center, as your DevOps partner.”
Says Markus Speth, Co-CEO VSHN and CMO
“Intelligent processes, highly automated infrastructure and microservices are the future and this is what we offer with our Open Source managed service framework Project Syn (syn.tools). With Project Syn, we have laid the foundation for our future Managed Services on top of all Kubernetes platforms. With Crossplane as an integral part of Project Syn, we reach 100% automated self-service provisioning from within Kubernetes. “Run clusters as cattle”: everyone can run a fleet of Kubernetes clusters and contribute to the project. With Kubernetes First, we are focusing for the coming years and continue what we do best.”
Says Tobias Brunner, Co-CEO VSHN and Product Owner.
VSHN offers a DevOps workshop where VSHN experts analyze the current situation and tech stack of your application and offer best practice solutions to move, run and operate your application on Kubernetes in the future.
Existing customer solutions based on virtual machines will continue to be maintained and a migration to a Kubernetes-based solution will be part of the normal platform life-cycle.
About VSHN – The DevOps Company
VSHN is Switzerland’s leading partner for DevOps, Container & Kubernetes. VSHN (pronounced like “vision”) was founded with the intention to fundamentally shake up the hosting market. As a lean startup, we have focused on operating applications through automation, agility and a continuous improvement process. Completely location-independent and without its 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.
VSHN Quick Facts
42 employees
350 partners
Operating in 16 clouds
Founded 2014
100% self-owned
Winner Digital Economy Award 2019
VSHN is the link between business, software development, and IT operations. VSHN supports software developers in making applications automatically testable, deployable and scalable and operating them on any infrastructure. In addition to close and agile cooperation and consulting, we also take over responsibility for the stability of our services, including 24/7 support.
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
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VSHN has been a fan of Crossplane since its very early days in 2019. Since then the project has matured a lot and is now used in production by VSHN and many others. In mid 2020 Crossplane became a CNCF Sandbox project and lately applied to be promoted to be a CNCF Incubation project. It’s time for an introduction to Crossplane, why it matters to VSHN and talk about our production usage.
This blog article is also available as a video talk (with corresponding slides).
Use Case: Self-Service Marketplace with Crossplane Service Broker
The very first use case we were able to fulfill by using Crossplane is a project for a VSHN customer who provides a self-service marketplace to their internal customers (developer and service teams). This marketplace is available in their internal Cloudfoundry environment, presented as a one-click service provisioning web-interface. Via this interface, the end-user can order a MariaDB Galera Cluster or a Redis Cluster with different characteristics (e.g. available storage or memory), called Service Plans, with one click. This infrastructure runs in an on-premise datacenter which doesn’t provide any of the well-known hyperscaler services and APIs. We were able to use the Crossplane Helm Provider to deploy services which are specified by Crossplane Composite Resources and Compositions.
In the world of Cloudfoundry the Open Service Broker API is used to provision and manage services. To have a native integration in to the marketplace we developed a Crossplane Service Broker which maps the concepts of the Open Service Broker API specification to the concepts of Crossplane. As they match very well, the integration and translation between these two APIs is very easy.
This concept lays the foundation for many upcoming new services of VSHN, under the name “Application Catalog”. Watch out this space for more articles about this topic!
What is Crossplane?
In short:
Crossplane is an open source Kubernetes add-on that enables platform teams to assemble infrastructure from multiple vendors, and expose higher level self-service APIs for application teams to consume, without having to write any code.
To achieve this promise, Crossplane brings three main features with it:
Providers: These are the pluggable building blocks to provision and manage infrastructure. Each provider enables the use of an upstream or third-party API, for example of a cloud provider, and manages the abstraction to it by bringing Kubernetes custom resources (CRDs) with it. These custom resources are called “managed resources” in the Crossplane world and resemble the upstream API as closely as possible. As each upstream provider has its own opinionated API, Crossplane aligns these interface by providing its own opinionated structure, the Crossplane Resource Model, abbreviated XRM. This allows for example to have a unified API for things like status conditions and references. Crossplane itself brings already a lot of providers out-of-the-box and under the crossplane-contrib GitHub organization a lot of third-party providers are being developed.
Compositions: This is a Crossplane specific construct which enables the possibility to define new custom APIs – called “composite resources” (XR) – which provide a pre-configured set of managed resources. By predefining a set of managed resources – called “composition” – the end-user of the platform (e.g. the developer) is being enabled to get infrastructure in an actually usable self-service way. The user doesn’t have to care about the inner details of for example an AWS RDS instance which most of the time needs a lot of configuration and other objects (VPC, networking, firewalling, access control). This work is done by the platform team.
Packages: Sharing opinionated infrastructures is done by packaging up all the resources (XRD, Provider, Compositions) in to a package and re-distributing it as a standard OCI image.
The three core features described above in itself are already very cool, but we feel that there is much more behind it.
As Crossplane leverages the Kubernetes API and concepts, it enables a lot of possibilities:
Usage of a well-known API. There is no need to learn a completely new API.
This allows to re-use tooling like GitOps to declaratively manage infrastructure.
The infrastructure is defined in the same language (Kubernetes API style) as the application deployment is described. No need to learn a new domain-specific language.
With that there can be one place which describes everything needed to run an application, including all the infrastructure needs (databaes, caches, indexes, queues, …).
As Crossplane is a Kubernetes operator, it has reconciliation built into its heart and therefore all the time actively makes sure that the infrastructure adheres to the defined state. Manual changes to the infrastructure will be rolled-back immediately. No configuration drift is possible this way.
Battle-tested Kubernetes RBAC rules help to control access to infrastructure provisioning and management.
Kubernetes is much more than “just” container orchestration. It’s the platform aspect that counts, the well-defined API and the concepts of the control-loop. Crossplane brings this to the next level, making Kubernetes more independent of containers than ever before.
VSHN lately updated its company beliefs in which we set out to bet on Kubernetes as the technical foundation for everything we do in the future. With Crossplane we can now even provision all the infrastructure we need straight out of Kubernetes, no need to use another, disconnected tool anymore.
One API to rule them all:
Core Kubernetes APIs to orchestrate application containers Crossplane APIs to orchestrate infrastructure
Comparison to other Infrastructure as Code tools
The above description might already shed some light where the differences to other Infrastructure as code tools like Terraform, Pulumi or Ansible are.
Why not Terraform?
When directly comparing Crossplane with Terraform the most important aspect is that Terraform is a command-line (CLI) tool acting on control-planes, where Crossplane is a control-plane itself which is active all the time.
To configure infrastructure with Terraform, the user has to declare the intended architecture in the domain specific HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL). After that the CLI has to be invoked manually which starts Terraform to plan and actually apply the configuration. After that the current state is stored in a state file to represent the current infrastructure. When something changes in the infrastructure without telling Terraform about it, the stored state differs from the actual state and on the next CLI invocation no-one knows what happens. Also, when only wanting to change something on one of the probably many provisioned services, Terraform always configures all services which could take a long time and affect other services as well, unintended. Automating Terraform is very hard because of these and many other issues. Many more aspects are discussed in Crossplane vs Terraform.
That doesn’t mean Terraform is bad, it’s just a completely different approach to manage infrastructure.
Why not cloud specific Kubernetes operators?
Many, if not all, of the big cloud providers (Hyperscaler) are providing a native Kubernetes operator to manage their cloud of out Kubernetes: Google Cloud has their Config Connector, Azure the Service Operator and AWS the Controllers for Kubernetes. All these operators are specific to the cloud they are engineered for and are providing low-level access to their services. While it’s perfectly fine to use them, Crossplane provides an abstraction layer where the same APIs can be used cross-cloud and presents the platform user the same API, independent on which cloud the cluster is running on and how all the services are named. By leveraging the Composition feature of Crossplane the user doesn’t have to care what all is needed to properly provision a service: For example a production-grade AWS RDS instance has hundreds of configuration values and needs networking, security group, API connection secret, user, schema and grants. This all can be easily abstracted by Crossplane Compositions. An in-depth discussion can be found in Crossplane vs Cloud Provider Infrastructure Addons.
Keeping up with infrastructure providers
Cloud providers are constantly adding and changing services. The Crossplane providers somehow have to keep up with that. As it’s nearly impossible and also impractical to manually keep up with the changes, the Crossplane developers have engineered tools to generate Crossplane providers out of already existing and well maintained SDKs.
Examples:
Because Terraform has a huge user base, a lot of upstream providers are already supported and are implemented as Terraform providers. Crossplane is working on a way to generate Crossplane providers out of Terraform providers. See Adding VMware support to Crossplane using Terraform Provider Generation for an example how VMware support is provided by leveraging the already very complete Terraform provider.
To better understand Crossplane, a few Crossplane specific terms will need an explanation:
Providers: Extends Crossplane to enable infrastructure resource provisioning. In order to provision a resource, a Custom Resource Definition (CRD) needs to be registered in the Kubernetes cluster and its controller should be watching the Custom Resources those CRDs define.
Managed Resources: The Crossplane representation of the cloud provider resources and they are considered primitive low level custom resources that can be used directly to provision external cloud resources for an application or as part of an infrastructure composition.
Crossplane Resource Model (XRM): Standardization between all providers, defining for example the status properties and resource references.
Composite Resource (XR): A special kind of custom resource that is composed of other resources. Its schema is user-defined.
Composite Resource Definition (XRD): Defines a new kind of composite resource, and optionally the claim it offers.
Composite Resource Claim (XRC): Declares that an application requires a particular kind of infrastructure, as well as specifying how to configure it.
Composition: Specifies how Crossplane should reconcile a composite infrastructure resource – i.e. what infrastructure resources it should compose. It can be used to build a catalog of custom resources and classes of configuration that fit the needs and opinions of an organization.
Video introduction
Tobias Brunner
Tobias Brunner is working since over 20 years in IT and more than 15 years with Internet technology. New technology has to be tried and written about.
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