Customer testimonial
Container Lifecycle Management Made Easy Across A Fleet of Offshore Floating Hotels
Established in 2006, Floatel International provides top-quality offshore Floatels for extreme conditions. The company has its principal place of business and group headquarters in Oslo, Norway. They provide reliable and high-performance floating hotels, or Floatels, designed for deep waters and hostile environments all around the world.
Working with their long-term cloud partner Xenit with its headquarters in Gothenburg, Sweden, Floatel has successfully implemented Avassa’s Edge Platform for managing the lifecycle of their first on-prem container application.
Navigating the Challenges of Container Deployments to Remote Floatels
Already before adopting Avassa’s Edge Platform, Floatel has, through the support of Xenit and other partners, utilized a virtualization platform. The VM solution has catered to needs of legacy Windows applications and other on-prem compute needs, but has historically not had capabilities for on-prem container management. Recognizing the need to evolve, they sought to incorporate a container runtime to modernize parts of their operations. The floatels are situated in remote, exposed, and isolated locations, making them business-critical and demanding full application autonomy and robust operations. This isolation also necessitated strict requirements for offline capabilities, as internet connectivity is often disrupted.
Floatel decided to add a container application to their stack with future plans to move more containerized workloads to their vessels. Planning ahead, they needed support for an easy-to-use tool for the lifecycle management of these container applications on-prem at their fleet of vessels.
Avassa Edge Platform’s outperformed the other considered vendors thanks to its support for offline capabilities and its user-friendliness, allowing us to set up the container orchestration without having to involve the Kubernetes experts at Xenit, which would have been a significantly bigger project for Floatel.
Simon Gottschlag, CTO of Co-native (Xenits parent company)
The Implementation of a Purpose-built Platform for Container Management and Operations
Xenit took on the challenge of managing the lifecycle of the container applications, including deployment, versioning, and monitoring, all remotely. During their evaluation of different options, they found that Kubernetes-based solutions added unnecessary complexity and cost. On the other hand, more IoT-oriented solutions were too infrastructure-centric and didn’t align with Floatel’s focus on container runtimes running on a virtualization layer.
Avassa’s Edge Platform emerged as the perfect solution for Floatel’s needs. It provided a user-friendly, secure, and robust way of managing containers across their fleet. Given the exposed and isolated locations of the vessel, the offline capabilities of the Avassa Edge Platform enabled Xenit to provide fault-tolerant application delivery to Floatel.
Key features of Floatel’s Avassa Edge Platform implementation
- Offline capabilities: Allowing Floatel’s application operations to remain uninterrupted throughout outages in internet connectivity.
- Remote deployment and versioning: Reducing the need for on-site visits and increasing feature velocity. This is especially important for sites without on-site IT personnel.
- Scalable Day 2 operations: Paving the way for quick and easy onboarding of multiple container applications in the future from internal teams as well as from 3rd party vendors.
The Result: Container Management Made Cost-Efficient and Easy
The implementation of Avassa’s Edge Platform has provided Floatel with an easy-to-use solution for managing container applications across their fleet of floatels.
“Avassa Edge Platform’s outperformed the other considered vendors thanks to its support for offline capabilities and its user-friendliness,” said Simon Gottschlag, CTO of Co-native (Xenits parent company), “allowing us to set up the container orchestration without having to involve the Kubernetes experts at Xenit, which would have been a significantly bigger project for Floatel. The Avassa Edge platform makes container application lifecycle management, a not altogether trivial thing, extremely comprehensive and user-friendly. We can offer full container management and operations services to Floatel right at our 2nd line support, enabling blazing fast turnaround times and cost-efficiency.”
This has allowed Floatel to streamline their operations and maintain cost efficiency.
“Avassa truly makes a quite complex problem, impressively easy to solve. That’s what purpose-built technology should do and we are super satisfied with the performance and capabilities of their Edge Platform.” said Karl Linder, IT Manager of Floatel International, “The collaboration between Xenit and Avassa has been running very smooth throughout this project, all the way into production. We are very excited by the potential for faster innovation, and look forward to expanding our use of containerized workloads in the future.”
In conclusion, the implementation of Avassa’s Edge Platform by Xenit has proven to be a perfect fit for Floatel’s container management needs. It has simplified their container application operations, made it more cost-efficient, and ensured a seamless deployment across a fleet of distant, isolated sites.
“Avassa has made the implementation of containers applications at Floatel’s remote on-prem IT operations a breeze.” said Josefin Boman, Support Engineer at Xenit, “They enable us to easily and more efficiently ensure seamless operations even in the most challenging, isolated environments. Their user experience is on a level of its own and their support has been extremely helpful in the planning phase and roll-out to Floatels hotel fleet.”
Learn more
This case highlights how Floatel, with the help of Xenit and Avassa’s Edge Platform, transformed their approach to container management, resulting in improved operations and cost efficiency.
Learn more about Floatel here: https://floatel.no/
Learn more about Xenit here: https://xenit.se/
Learn more about Avassa’s edge application management platform here: https://avassa.io/platform
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