Pyvotal Solutions: Enhancing Platform Reliability and Cost-Efficiency with Containers
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Middleware & Microservices
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
- E-Commerce
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Procurement
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Construction Management
- Infrastructure Inspection
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Pyvotal Solutions is a specialized consulting and Cloud services company with over 25 years of experience in IT, supporting high-traffic, world-class websites. The company is focused on the Latin American market and was started over four years ago to meet the need for companies in the region to adopt cloud and other modern IT practices to become more agile, effective, and efficient. Pyvotal Solutions helps companies wanting to expand to other regions and markets by building out the necessary infrastructure and systems. While their main focus is on infrastructure and platform services, they also partner with application development specialists to provide a complete solution for their customers. Their clients include over 60 e-commerce customers expanding their market reach, including companies in communications, mobile, and airlines.
The Challenge
Pyvotal Solutions, a cloud-based infrastructure and platform services company, was faced with the challenge of building platform solutions for cost-conscious, yet demanding customers. The company needed to provide a reliable, high-performance platform using fewer resources. The majority of their customers required a complete managed solution for their applications, such as e-commerce sites, without wanting to manage the infrastructure or the CMS. Additionally, they needed a solution that was agile and cost-effective. Traditional virtual machines were not efficient as they required a dedicated resource per application, leading to underutilization of resources during certain times of the day. Furthermore, the company faced challenges in running stateful services on containers, particularly in managing persistent storage.
The Solution
To address these challenges, Pyvotal Solutions turned to containers. Containers allowed the company to make better use of the underlying infrastructure by running many containers on a server, thus providing a more granular and manageable environment for customer solutions. This approach enabled them to be much closer to the demand curve in terms of resources being provisioned. To manage the containers, they used Rancher. For persistent storage, they explored different solutions, including Amazon’s EFS (Elastic File System), and Portworx. They chose Portworx as it was easy to deploy, manage, integrate via Docker Compose, and integrated with Rancher. Portworx also provided cloud-based snapshots that could be stored in a low-cost object storage environment like S3 for disaster recovery. This solution made their Container-as-a-Service offering viable, reliable, and cost-effective.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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