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Streetline, a leading company providing parking intelligence software and services, was facing challenges with its first-generation software that was written to run on VMs in enterprise data centers. As the company grew, it started to add services on the cloud and recognized the potential of containerization and Kubernetes as their future platform. However, due to preferences from their customers for their data to be physically segregated from the public cloud, Streetline did not select a hosted offering from a cloud vendor. The team examined CoreOS, Rancher, and other methods to run Kubernetes distributions. They decided to run their own distribution of Kubernetes. Once Kubernetes was deployed and the operations fairly well automated, the focus turned to ways to minimize operational overhead while deploying a variety of stateful workloads including Redis, MySQL, Elasticsearch, and GitLab.

Volkswagen Group, the world’s second largest automaker, was facing a challenge with its IT environment which had become decentralized and heterogonous due to its recent growth. Brands, divisions, and advanced initiatives operate on different IT platforms which requires costly investment in hundreds of technologies and development tools. The company's heterogeneous IT platforms included specialized hardware, often with long procurement cycles, and required significant manual work to provision new resources. Furthermore, expensive storage solutions were being consumed by applications that doubled in their capacity requirements every two years. The company needed to unify and automate work streams and platforms across the entire Volkswagen Group. New standardized infrastructure would need to replace existing developer systems yet still connect to legacy applications that maintain important data.

The operator, a leading telecommunications company based in Japan, was looking to offer Kubernetes to enterprise customers interested in running cloud-native applications. They wanted to deploy Kubernetes as part of a hybrid environment that would give clients the flexibility of accessing VMs, containers or baremetal instances as needed. The operator was also interested in creating internal business applications with microservices and needed to provide containers to internal development teams. One of the benefits they saw in Kubernetes was the ability to reduce hypervisor overhead by running containers on baremetal. The operator was using legacy VMware based virtualization infrastructure, which required not only significant hypervisor resources, but also a lot of effort to operate and troubleshoot, not to mention downtime from periodic version upgrades.

The Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE), China's second-largest exchange, was experiencing rapid growth, processing millions of trades each day for its 1700 listed companies. However, the existing IT systems were not meeting the computational needs of fund managers. Traditional client-server technology began to fall short of performance requirements and lacked the flexibility to accommodate fast-moving industry developments. To thrive, fund managers needed new systems that were scalable, centralized, and not locked into specific vendors or architectures. The new systems also needed to be high-performing, elastic, open, and secure to meet the stringent regulations of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC).

Telstra, a leading telecommunications and technology company, was facing challenges in dynamically allocating bandwidth to efficiently provide the exact network resources required by every user at any given time. This was critical to minimize latency in applications with large volumes of fast-moving data and to maintain high end-to-end performance in bandwidth-intensive applications, such as video, gaming and other multimedia. The rapid growth of cloud computing was putting tremendous pressure on the company to ensure reliable, high-performance networking services despite heavier traffic patterns and greater strain on network bandwidth for distributed computing operations. The company's PEN group had historically built out infrastructure that made provisioning a circuit for customers a multiweek process that included manually setting up switches, routers and other equipment. Customers were becoming more savvy and demanded more speed — in tasks ranging from provisioning circuits to allocating bandwidth.

To maintain leadership and sustain enterprise business growth, STC must continuously increase the value offered to customers and improve IT operations. While recent increases of colocation services from five data centers fueled expansion, STC customers still demand new and differentiated services. STC crafted a strategy to market third-party PaaS and SaaS solutions hosted on a comprehensive STC IaaS platform, and began to recruit cloud partners. Pursuing this ecosystem-based strategy, however, required carrier grade availability, performance, scalability, and security while maintaining a cost structure that permits market leading price points.

EMC Corporation, a leader in foundational technologies for data storage, management, protection, and analysis, was facing challenges with its cloud management layer. The company's massively scalable storage service required a powerful management layer to provision, monitor, and manage cloud resources and transactions. However, the initial management layer's manual processes were demanding excessive staff resources due to recent customer growth. The company needed a new cloud management solution that could handle high availability, performance, and scalability. The solution also needed to be easy-to-use and highly secure. In addition, the new management layer would also be the foundation for two additional cloud services: public compute as a service coupled with the object storage service, and private cloud compute resources for EMC’s internal software development staff.

The article does not provide specific details on the challenge or situation.

Global organizations increasingly rely on technology to innovate and beat the competition. Business executives have an insatiable demand for SaaS applications and E-commerce teams depend on big data analytics. Finance and engineering require dynamically scaling systems and sales mandates mobile and secure access. New workloads, however, must integrate with legacy systems. Thus, IT needs solutions to connect old deployments with new ones, public with private, and physical with virtual. Furthermore, these integrations must not lead to a loss of control, such as systems use without IT oversight, which could result in increased security or compliance risk.

ProSiebenSat.1 Group, a leading European TV broadcasting, digital content, and e-commerce company, faced challenges due to its decentralized structure. Each of its more than 20 business units and subsidiaries had a tailored approach to software development and platforms, leading to varied IT environments. This structure, while allowing teams to drive innovation and growth, also resulted in similar IT challenges across the board. Fast-paced markets required rapid and creative content development, and competitive forces yielded cost and data protection pressure. Provisioning of new servers often took days and hindered business agility. Some teams turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to speed up time-to-market, but not all production applications were best suited for the public cloud deployments. Other divisions migrated to VMware-based virtualized server environments, and a few maintained bare metal and legacy compute environments. Emerging development teams leveraged LAMP stacks, node.js, and MongoDB. But with this varied approach, not all teams had adopted the latest IT best practices such as continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) and breaking IT silos. More recently, data protection risks caught the attention of ProSiebenSat.1 business leaders, most notably those using public cloud services. The company embraced strong data protection policies, but reliance on U.S. cloud providers brought security concerns.

The bank, one of the 20 largest regional banks in the world, was facing new competition from non-traditional banks with flexible infrastructure and agile development. Despite recent IT systems centralization of all regional subsidiaries onto a single platform, and reliability improvements, the bank’s leaders called for faster application development and innovation. Each application required a unique development and testing environment, making the bank’s infrastructure complex and diverse. The bank’s engineers had to wait days or weeks for new systems to be provisioned, during which time, provisioning visibility remained low. Once deployed, engineers and IT had poor visibility of platform utilization. These inefficiencies drove new server purchases to 500 units per year, constraining other IT investment. The bank needed a new environment to minimize the time and effort it took to build platforms, ideally with self-service and visibility for developers.

The technology-driven business unit of a leading credit card company was flourishing in its early years, successfully reaching consumers with no previous access to traditional banking services. However, as the prepaid debit card expanded and added online and mobile features, the division became increasingly reliant on internally developed software applications and on-premise infrastructure. By early 2014, the platform infrastructure to support the mobile and web-centric business spanned multiple data centers and technologies. Advanced server, storage, and networking solutions adequately supported application growth, however, complex processes to provision and manage infrastructure began to constrain developer agility and slow release cycles. A principal concern was the two-week period to provision software development platforms. A second challenge was the deviation of environments between development, test, and production systems. Lastly, infrastructure capital and operating expenses continued to grow.

G-Core, a company that provides infrastructure for online multiplayer games, was facing challenges due to its tremendous growth. The fast-paced gaming market required clients to continuously improve games and quickly launch new features, and G-Core needed to make sure they were in a position to do that. However, G-Core struggled to cost-effectively maintain infrastructure performance and scale. Its game hosting spanned thousands of servers in 20 data centers and had even set a world record of 1,140,000 peak concurrent users. As platform expenses rose, G-Core needed improved resource utilization and cost margins. Furthermore, to shorten release cycles, gaming developers required self-service access to resources. Provisioning VM and bare metal servers, however, often involved release managers opening multiple tickets that took many days and administrators to resolve. The activity was complex, labor-intensive, and subject to human error. To help make Wargaming successful, G-Core had to help simplify the process of maintaining continuous integration and deployment of high-quality games.

The company’s engineering teams build infrastructure and applications that allow the business to deliver market leading digital content to TVs, PCs, and mobile devices. This requires systems that rapidly scale, speed time-to-market, and protect valued intellectual property; all without exceeding target costs. Agile and immediate expansion of infrastructure is especially important for comprehensive sports offerings. “Demand spikes during important events can place a huge strain on our systems,” says the company’s Director of Cloud Solutions. “To respond to large-scale online requests, we often need immediate and sizable increases in application capacity.” Equally important to business success is enabling rapid development and deployment of new customer services. Continuous integration and deployment, now replacing waterfall programming methods, require elastic system architectures that allow for quick provisioning and deprovisioning of infrastructure based on developer needs. In addition to scalability and speed of development, new systems require strong protection of intellectual property to prevent cyber attacks. This means integration with existing robust security solutions. New infrastructure must also integrate with existing network and storage frameworks, and accommodate software development processes with minimal impact on efficiency.

The company, a leading telecommunications and technology company based in the Asia Pacific region, was facing challenges in dynamically allocating bandwidth to efficiently provide the exact network resources required by every user at any given time. This was critical to minimize latency in applications with large volumes of fast-moving data and to maintain high end-to-end performance in bandwidth-intensive applications, such as video, gaming and other multimedia. The rapid growth of cloud computing was putting tremendous pressure on carriers and enterprises to ensure reliable, high-performance networking services despite heavier traffic patterns and greater strain on network bandwidth for distributed computing operations. The company's infrastructure made provisioning a circuit for customers a multiweek process that included manually setting up switches, routers and other equipment.

Bailian Group, China's largest retailer, faced the challenge of transforming its business model from traditional brick and mortar to omni-channel business to keep up with the rapid growth of online commerce in China. The company's existing IT infrastructure was complex and not conducive to the fast-paced innovation required in the e-commerce sector. Low server utilization, long provisioning times, and high operating costs were impeding the company's growth in the omnichannel sales sector. The company needed a large-scale IT platform that would enable innovation and growth, with fast development, dynamic scaling, uncompromised availability, and low cost of operations.

The satellite operator was facing a challenge with the increasing number of cord-cutters and cord-nevers, people who have never subscribed to a traditional pay-TV service. The operator wanted to capitalize on this situation and address the more than 100 million payTV households by launching a monthly OTT subscription service that includes live and on-demand content. The operator had an aggressive timeline for its new service launch. The goal was to get the project off the ground within weeks. Video quality was an important consideration, and there needed to be very low latency. Moreover, the operator wanted to be able to offer its OTT service to subscribers at a much lower price point than a full satellite service in the U.S. Given these parameters, Mirantis and Harmonic partnered to deliver a cloud-native media processing solution on OpenStack that met these requirements, offering quick time to market, high video quality and little to no CAPEX.

The company faced a unique IT challenge due to the massive size and intermittent needs of video post-production workloads. Media coloring, rendering, and transcoding for movies required compute and storage resources that spiked to enormous levels at irregular intervals. An increase in new server requests to meet peak utilization placed substantial strain on existing IT resources. The company needed to improve innovation, decrease time-to-market, and cut capital costs. Massive file storage needs for animation and high definition video was projected at 100X growth over 10 years. This growth could not be serviced by the current architecture. Without migrating to a centralized and shared private cloud, infrastructure costs would multiply.

We2o, a technology company founded in 2014, aims to revolutionize the philanthropy sector by providing an online platform that leverages social data and the web to connect charities, companies, and donors. However, the company faced a significant challenge in building an architecture that could incorporate data and provide real-time analytics. Many charitable organizations were using outdated technology that offered little in terms of user engagement, and they lacked the ability to collect and analyze data about their online fundraising efforts. We2o needed a third-party partner with a robust, ready-made analytics solution that could be easily integrated into their platform.

Yellow Pages Group (YPG) has undergone a significant transformation from a print company to a web-based company, expanding into new channels including social and mobile. This rapid growth led to a messy and ad hoc deployment of applications running on different technologies, making it difficult to integrate all properties into a single view. As web traffic began to grow exponentially, YPG’s challenges became more acute. They diagnosed web performance issues using tracing and logging, which was time-consuming and essentially left them in the dark. Whenever developers released a new version of a website, they would inevitably encounter problems and need to roll everything back.

As RunKeeper increased in popularity, application performance became increasingly difficult to predict. The company’s engineering team now stands at 20 people and is organized into several subgroups to focus on key features. The challenge was how to go from a handful of developers to multiple teams who are deploying features for more than 27 million users. Before using New Relic, RunKeeper already had a number of performance monitoring tools in place. However, a significant gap remained in the company’s ability to understand the root cause of emerging issues.

FiftyThree, a company that develops tools for mobile creation, uses Node.js as its server-side code for enabling features like the in-app Made With Paper stream and the account system for ordering Moleskine Books. The development team chose this JavaScript approach for a couple of reasons, the first one being that they liked the simplicity of using the same language on both the back- and front-end. Node.js’ event loop model also made it perfectly suited for being a fast web server. And it didn’t hurt that there was an enthusiastic and fanatical community surrounding Node.js to help FiftyThree solidify its decision. With its new framework in place, however, the FiftyThree team knew it also needed a performance monitoring solution to ensure that Paper was delivering the best user experience possible.

MultiPlan, a healthcare cost management solutions provider, was experiencing dramatic growth, processing as many as 140 million claims annually. The company relied on almost 400 different software applications and almost 100 web services to drive its business. In 2011, the team began to encounter performance issues with the web services they were running in Cape Clear, an enterprise service bus. They had very little visibility into the performance of key components across that environment. Customers often discovered issues before they did. The tipping point came when an unexpected weekend outage caused the company to re-evaluate their performance monitoring.

Scopely, a mobile gaming company, is on a fast track of growth. In just two years, the company has released six live games and has several more in development. With each new game, Scopely aims to increase its market share by attracting new audiences. This strategy has resulted in a larger network of non-competing users, translating into higher revenue. However, it also translates into heavier traffic. With the popularity of Scopely’s newest releases, the company is handling nearly two billion API requests per week. This level of popularity means that Scopely needs to be extra-vigilant in maintaining the performance of its applications. The company needs a solution that can help it monitor and optimize the performance of its applications to handle the increasing traffic and ensure optimal user experience.

iTesso, a software company for the global hospitality industry, was facing challenges with its cloud environment. The company's flagship SaaS product, iTesso, is a cloud-native enterprise lodging system built on the Windows Azure platform. However, the company was often unaware of performance issues until customers started calling the contact center to complain. The feedback from customers was often vague and difficult to validate, making it hard to identify and address the root cause of the issues. The company needed a more comprehensive approach to monitoring its application. The iTesso system is complex and full of dependencies, and the company wanted to monitor everything as a whole, not just separate components.

Cash Converters' IT team faced a challenge in application monitoring. They were using Azure monitoring and application log files to diagnose emerging issues, but these tools did not provide end-to-end application insight. They lacked visibility into network I/O, disk I/O, CPU, memory, application throughput, and how their application consumed system resources and behaved. When a problem arose, they couldn't be sure if it was a database issue or an application issue. They were essentially flying blind. They developed application instrumentation for lower-level insight into granular performance issues, but still lacked a system-wide view. They needed a more holistic approach to monitoring the performance of their application.

When Eric Peterson joined Tableau in 2011, he began working in the marketing department’s development team. The team was responsible for managing a number of Drupal web applications, including the main corporate website — but he soon found himself facing considerable limitations. “The network operations team was handling all of our monitoring,” he explains. “We had very little access to their monitoring data, so we had almost no insight into the issues we were facing in production. We were basically flying blind.”

When BeenVerified opened for business in 2007, the company had no easy way to gauge site performance. The company was totally focused on getting their product out the door, but they didn’t know if the engines were burning hot — they had almost no visibility into any of that. They could log into each machine to check the memory and CPU, but there was no centralized dashboard for overall performance of the app. The company's Senior Software Engineer's email inbox was flooded with exception notifications. This lack of visibility into the performance of their application was a major challenge for the company.

Unwired Revolution, a mobile solutions integrator, has been focusing on the development of custom mobile apps to help clients' internal teams collaborate more effectively. However, they faced challenges in ensuring consistent performance of these apps. During the testing phases for client projects, they often encountered performance issues that were difficult to identify and reproduce. For instance, a pilot end user reported an increase in 'server errors', but the source of the problem was elusive. The company wanted to be proactive in identifying problems before they impacted end users, but their only option was to review log files and debug traces, which was time-consuming and inefficient.

Manheim, a leading provider of vehicle remarketing services, faced challenges in maintaining high performance during a rapidly growing online and mobile app user base. The company's online presence serves as an additional buying channel for automotive industry professionals, providing them with valuable research tools to determine the current wholesale market value for any given vehicle. However, if one of their sites is not performing well, it can affect their ability to operate at maximum capacity and properly service their customers. Furthermore, as automotive professionals became accustomed to conducting much of their business on smartphones, Manheim responded with a major expansion of its mobile capabilities. This added complexity to their environment, making it challenging to diagnose problems.