Case Studies

Inpixon Selects Rafay to Streamline & Standardize Kubernetes Ops

Learn how to standardize your company's Kubernetes Ops

Rafay’s Value
  • Time to Kubernetes: < 3 months
  • Faster Developer On-Boarding
  • Standardized Cluster Configurations
  • Consistent Deployment Process

Customer Profile

Inpixon (Nasdaq: INPX) is the innovator of Indoor Intelligence, delivering actionable insights for people, places and things. The company combines the power of mapping, locationing and actionable intelligence for smarter, safer and more secure environments. The company’s indoor location data platform that ingests diverse data from IoT, third-party and proprietary sensors combined with a high-performance data analytics engine, patented algorithms, and advanced mapping technology is leveraged by a multitude of industries around the globe.

Inpixon’s Environment

  • Infrastructure: Multi-Cloud
  • Deployment: Rafay GitOps Pipelines
  • Logging: ELK
  • Monitoring: Elastic Metric Beats

“This initiative was absolutely critical to the success of the next phase of growth for the company.”

— Greg Saunders, Director of Cloud Engineering, Inpixon

Inpixon’s Rapid Growth Led to a Strategic Initiative to Scale DevOps

In order to support fast-paced customer growth Inpixon embarked on a strategic initiative to ensure that any part of their modern technology stack could be deployed anywhere – on premises or in a private or public cloud. A key requirement was to leverage open technologies and, after researching numerous options, the team chose to use Docker to containerize their modern applications along with Kubernetes and Helm to deploy and manage them.

Since the project was to be leveraged enterprise-wide, Inpixon ran into three critical Kubernetes operations challenges as the team architected their solution and processes. First, given a geographically disparate development team, there was no easy way to create and enforce the use of standard cluster configurations (including their various ecosystem technologies) making it difficult to efficiently support applications in the wild.

In addition, it was difficult to create a repeatable workload deployment process that can be employed across the company. Lastly, with numerous applications within their ecosystem, a vast amount of work and knowledge was required to configure the Inpixon stack in a development environment. This was onerous and time-consuming on the part of the developer.

“We researched and tested several solutions, but none were able to meet all of our needs. The Rafay KOP fit our use case perfectly. It was up and running quickly, easy to use, and allowed us to deploy clusters anywhere in a centralized, standardized manner for the entire company to leverage.”

— Greg Saunders, Director of Cloud Engineering, Inpixon

Inpixon Chose the Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform to Standardize Kubernetes Operations

After researching several Kubernetes management solutions, Inpixon chose the Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform (KOP). The KOP was the only solution that could be up and running quickly and not only met the critical requirement to deploy clusters anywhere but also solved the operational hurdles associated with such an enterprise-wide, strategic initiative.

The Rafay KOP is Kubernetes distribution agnostic and allows Inpixon to deploy in any location that is best for the company and its customers. Inpixon can easily deploy, manage & move containerized workloads between data centers, edge devices and public clouds since it supports virtually any Kubernetes distribution including EKS, EKS-D, AKS, and GKE. With the KOP’s Cluster Blueprint feature, Inpixon can centrally create and manage an approved set of cluster configurations. This allows the company to rapidly provision standardized Kubernetes clusters that are automatically configured with enterprise-sanctioned tools (e.g., ELK for logging and Elastic Metric Beats for monitoring) wherever applications and clusters are deployed. This also enabled Inpixon to create standardized environments for their developers and QA professionals using VirtualBox-based local clusters without an abundance of steps to get a development or QA environment running.

Rafay’s GitOps Pipelines made it easy for Inpixon to implement a standard and repeatable deployment automation methodology. Using their Git repository as the source of truth, GitOps Pipelines enables Inpixon to apply a declarative deployment approach and create standard end-to-end deployment process from application build to deployment. A simple update to the Git repository with a new build would trigger Docker containerized applications to deploy automatically.

Rafay Enables Inpixon to Streamline DevOps Across the Company

With the Rafay KOP, Inpixon has realized numerous benefits. By creating and enforcing standard application and cluster configurations across their infrastructure, they’ve made it faster to onboard developers and easier to support their applications.

With the Rafay KOP, Inpixon has realized numerous benefits. By creating and enforcing standard application and cluster configurations across their infrastructure, they’ve made it faster to onboard developers and easier to support their applications.

In addition, they’ve created a standard deployment mechanism using GitOps that the entire developer organization can leverage. And they’ve done all of this while avoiding vendor or cloud lock-in with an open solution.

Inpixon discovered several other use cases that increased the value Rafay delivers. With the ability to create and manage standard environments, Inpixon could quickly and easily create application simulation environments based
on specific needs. Further, this allowed for rapid A/B testing in applications and even the creation of temporary environments for specific tests or demonstrations in no time. With Rafay, Inpixon could also centrally manage and audit access to their Kubernetes management infrastructure and better leverage Kubernetes and Helm to auto-scale and even rollback deployments.

“We researched and tested several solutions, but none were able to meet all of our needs”, said Greg. “The Rafay KOP fit our use case perfectly. It was up and running quickly, easy to use, and allowed us to deploy clusters anywhere in a centralized, standardized manner for the entire company to leverage.”

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