Industry Leading Cruise Line Chooses Rafay to Modernize Business & Entertainment Applications at the Edge

Challenges with Running Applications at the Edge

An industry-leading cruise ship operator was in the process of modernizing its numerous business and entertainment applications deployed and operated across its large fleet of cruise ships. Rolling out this new modern fleet of edge applications brought on many new challenges for the team.

• Rising costs and complexity to remotely manage apps on ships
• Workloads needed to remain available with intermittent or no internet connection
• Automate deployment of existing workloads running on EKS

Embarking on a Modernization Strategy with Amazon and Rafay

To solve some of these challenges, they looked at different hardware options, including Amazon Snowball Edge devices, and decided to leverage Amazon EKS-D as their Kubernetes distribution of choice. However, they still needed a way to automate the provisioning and operations of Amazon EKS-D clusters to reduce the time and resources required to deploy and manage their applications. In addition to supporting their fleet of cruise ships, they were also looking for a solution that would allow them to automate the operations of their existing workloads running in AWS using Amazon EKS from one consolidated place.

Modernizing a Fleet of Cruise Ships Requires a Modern Approach to Kubernetes Fleet Management

The Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform (KOP) was brought in to automate the provisioning and operations of Amazon EKS-D and Amazon EKS clusters while enforcing a consistent approach to Kubernetes operations across all their environments, including Amazon Snowball devices and AWS. They also leveraged GitiOps workflows to remotely automate provisioning and lifecycle management of Amazon EKS-A clusters deployed on their cruise ships. The Rafay KOP allowed them to create a standard cluster configuration for each Kubernetes cluster, including all of the required Kubernetes software addons, automate cluster upgrades, and provide secure, zero-trust access to their clusters.

Traveling in Modern Luxury with With Rafay and AWS

The powerful combination of AWS and Rafay helped this cruise line operator modernize its infrastructure and operations quickly. They’re currently operating 25+ clusters with plans to triple that within the next year. Rafay has reduced the operational risk of rolling out new clusters and given them the confidence to 3x their fleet with the same team, saving nearly a million dollars in operations headcount.

Rafay’s cloud-made solution provides the automation and governance capabilities that platform teams need to standardize Kubernetes toolsets and workflows. With Rafay, platform teams leverage the deepest Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS-A integration on the market to easily operate Kubernetes environments across data centers, public cloud, and edge environments with centralized visibility and access control, environment standardization, and guardrail enforcement. As a result, platform teams are able to deliver self-service and automation capabilities that delight developer and operations teams. Rafay also provides world-class professional services & support available 24×7 backed by an SLA.