Creating clarity in the complex telecom world is what Mobiel.nl has excelled at since day one. Behind the scenes, partner and Tech Lead Martijn van Leeuwen works daily with his team on improving customer processes technically.
The green cloud solution from Leafcloud allows room for innovation
"The move to a green cloud is a long-term project for Mobiel.nl and a considerable investment. It's not something you do with just a push of a button. We want to ensure that we choose a good, stable, and scalable infrastructure. It's important that we are not dependent on a single cloud provider. With this in mind, we've built the entire project. Leafcloud supports OpenStack and is thus an ideal partner within this objective. Additionally, it's a partner from whom we can learn and who can help us make the setup better and more robust."
Idealistic without drawbacks
"We find Leafcloud's approach to using residual heat very clever. It's idealistic and has hardly any practical downsides for the end-user. Furthermore, the solution simply offers everything you'd expect from a cloud service: secure, powerful, and reliable. On this front, we resonate with each other. We provide our customers with the means to make smart choices when purchasing a mobile phone or a package for TV, internet, and home phone. We achieve this with a lot of technology on the backend, without the user noticing it. Think of online ordering convenience and specific customer actions. We seek solutions that are advantageous, efficient, and powerful. But we also ensure it's a sustainable solution that we can actually put into practice."
Transfer
"As a small team, we take on quite a bit. Adopting a new cloud platform adds extra work. We need additional staging and development capacity, and we aim to start using Leafcloud for this in the short term. Leveraging Rancher and on-premise clusters can bring significant benefits for us. We're soon starting the transfer of our test and staging environments to Leafcloud. This will provide us with performance at a good price, a green alternative, and allow all developers to become familiar with the environment. Gradually, we'll begin running applications in production."
Engaged devops team
"Throughout all levels within Mobiel.nl, there's a great deal of affinity for sustainability and new green initiatives. The energy consumption of our sector is something we're concerned about. Our devops team can translate the company's sustainable vision into technical solutions because many devops individuals are involved in critical parts of our system. Adopting an initiative like Leafcloud can swiftly be put into practice. And thus, together, step by step, we map out the desired green course."
"The energy consumption of our sector is something we're concerned about."
Martijn van Leeuwen
Challenging transition?
"Our current cloud service mainly consists of Google Cloud, including Kubernetes and CloudSQL. We utilize nodes and pre-emptibles due to costs. Initially, we manually configured them, but now it's automated through Terraform. This setup is powerful and provides flexibility. However, it also has several disadvantages: it's not very sustainable, we can't directly switch to another service, there's no support for our on-premise servers, and we can't test whether the setup is truly independent.
Our goal is to set up our cloud hosting in a way that applications run on Cloud A or Cloud B without users knowing. To achieve this, we're busy building a generic management layer with tooling to capture this complexity. For our devops group, this is an exciting challenge that generates a lot of energy. We're systematically working through each layer, making it easier for other developers to adopt. To reinforce this, we occasionally rotate people within the devops team to provide everyone with insight."
Step by step
"Properly setting up cloud hosting is a step-by-step and quite time-consuming process. Applications and services need adjustments, and intercommunication needs to be well organized. The container management and CI/CD must work in a way that's fast, reliable, and accessible to all developers. By using standards and proven tools, we ensure the setup is transferable and interchangeable. OpenStack is very handy in this regard. Once we've completed the installation, we can easily move our workload and set up clusters. Naturally, we encounter practical hurdles as well. For instance, Google automatically manages authentication to pull images, which unfortunately isn't possible yet on Leafcloud. But we'll surely find a solution for that."
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