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Rancher greatly reduces the time TNO spends managing containers and developing code, thus allowing TNO to spend more time on research projects that benefit society.

About TNO

TNO (Dutch Applied Scientific Research Organization) is an independent organization that aims to connect people with knowledge and create innovative projects that can enhance social well-being in a sustainable way. TNO employs more than 2600 experts in areas such as industry and energy in urbanization, healthy living and safety.

It is imperative to use the container

TNO researchers need to work closely with stakeholders in other companies, governments and research institutions. When TNO works on projects, team members often use their own preferred tools and programming languages, as well as their own prototyping and development environments in the early stages of work. Before using containers, TNO researchers found it troublesome to move the development work of team members to a production environment.

"We found that unlike virtual machines, if we use a micro-service architecture and Docker containers, we can ensure that our software works in exactly the same way on the researchers' own machines and on production machines." Johan van der Geest, an innovation scientist at TNO, explains: "there are great benefits in packaging things and moving them from the development environment to the production environment." Mark Bastiaans, an innovator at TNO.

A more comprehensive container management solution

When TNO first started using containers, researchers found that they needed more container-related features, including cross-host networking, cluster management, and service orchestration. "I stumbled upon Rancher because I was looking for a container management solution that could work across hosts," Bastiaans said. "then we found Rancher, and it really impressed me." For projects that require multiple hosts and set up several microservices in a service chain, "We need to see how it scales, and Rancher beautifully fills the gap."

As Rancher's container management solution continues to evolve, "We always make sure that our Rancher environment is up-to-date because its features always bring us a lot of benefits. The application service directory has been added, and load balancing has been added to our project," van der Geest said. Today, "Rancher's support for different orchestration tools-Kubernetes, Swarm, and Mesos---allows us to choose a framework that meets the needs of a particular project.

Automated CI/CD of Rancher

"We used CI/CD in the project before we used Docker," van der Geest explained, "but Rancher really helped us a lot in terms of continuous integration development. We can isolate the development environment from the production environment, and. We use Rancher API to automatically start the upgrade service, developers just need to push the code to the Git central repository, and a few minutes later it is automatically created, released, and active. "

Edwin Harmsma, a research scientist at TNO, said: "Rancher allows us to achieve fully automated integration testing and transform the automated stack from source code to deployment through a command-line interface." Van der Geest added: "We can now apply continuous integration to new and existing projects very quickly. The time required to create development and production environments and upgrade services in these environments has been greatly reduced."

"the next step is to use our solutions in more projects and demonstrate our real capabilities in continuous integration." So says van der Geest.

Micro-services, and faster research

"the great thing about Rancher is that the overall concept of microservices is well visualized, which is great for developers who are not familiar with it and want to start using it," Bastiaans said. "researchers are stubborn about choosing a working language, but if you show them a complete stack, you can make them willing to pack what they've done in a container. It will also give them a clearer understanding of the benefits of microservices. "

"with Docker and Rancher, we can get more researchers to start using microservices and let them do development work in their favorite language," Van Der Geest said. "I think this is a very useful thing." Van Der Geest is also interested in containerizing existing software and rapidly deploying software in different environments using the catalog features of Rancher

"for me, the whole container revolution is about how to accomplish more in less time," Bastiaans said. "as a research institution, we have always advocated trying new things. Now we have enough confidence to apply containers to more projects in the production environment."

Original source: Rancher Labs

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