The value of Kubernetes and Multi-Tenancy realised by Fastweb

With rapid adoption of Kubernetes, as the most valuable platform to deliver cloud native applications, multi-tenancy is becoming a de-facto consideration to be part of the initial architecture to achieve a highly efficient, agile and cost effective infrastructure.

We are seeing that it is not a matter of if multi-tenancy will become a requirement, but rather of how fast the need will surface. Usually, as customers get into production and start scaling rapidly, they will most likely hit the well-known cluster's sprawl issue, with all of the managerial and cost implications that come with that.

Our work at Clastix is to educate the industry that these problems can be avoided and through our expertise and open source multi-tenancy solutions, we can help customers to have a smooth transition and either prevent, or stop making cluster's sprawl become a big issue.

On that note, we are featuring Fastweb as an example of a company that indeed adopted Kubernetes, but also thought carefully at the front end of the project at how to use multi-tenancy to realise an efficient infrastructure.

Fastweb is a leading Italian Telco & Cloud provider. They operate FASTCloud, a modern infrastructure that delivers the latest generation of Cloud and Multi Cloud services across its certified Tier-IV data centres. To enhance its offering, Fastweb architected a container-as-a-service platform based on Kubernetes and Canonical Ubuntu, a modern enterprise open source Operating System.

The two core decision points at the front end of the project were:

1. The goal to improve efficiency and to enhance cloud services offered to households, businesses and public administration by leveraging a modern hyperscale-like approach with high-automation running on Kubernetes.

2. Architect multi-tenancy from the start to achieve the most flexible, scalable and operationally efficient infrastructure.

The journey from concept, to validation to production was achieved in partnership with Clastix engineering, for consultancy to implementation, and adoption of Capsule multi-tenancy operator. Canonical was also a partner on this project as the FASTCloud Kubernetes service is running on the battle-tested Ubuntu operating system.

Results

Fastweb has now entered production with new services with a modern containers platform that will help accelerate innovation with unprecedented agility and scalability. And it is able to do so with the extensive automation enabled by Kubernetes and Clastix's multi-tenancy solutions, which provides the simplicity of managing hundreds of customers with fewer hardware resources and saving from excessive operational effort.

In the words of Luca Tagliavia, head of ICT Multi-cloud BU at Fastweb:

“We are proud of the step forward we have taken with the new architecture, and we are very pleased to have partnered with the Clastix's team for their deep expertise and unique approach to Kubernetes. Implementing cloud native services with Clastix has been a great experience, and we look forward to continuing to grow with it.”

Bottom line

As Kubernetes is widely adopted for delivering cloud native applications, architecting for multi-tenancy as part of the initial implementation can prevent many issues down the road. While Clastix's engineers can help customers through the journey to cloud native, Clastix's has specialised in multi-tenancy solutions. Capsule multi-tenancy operator is an open source solution, developed by working closely with customers, and has proven to be highly effective to meet the requirements.

It takes less than 10 minutes to deploy Capsule on a Kubernetes platform, so there is only upside for deploying it! To learn more, please schedule a 30 minutes demo with one of our experts to understand how multi-tenancy can boost your operational efficiency.