Session Catalog

The customer makes the world's largest and most sophisticated manufacturing machinery. Building such complex machines requires teamwork, and this is a highly collaborative environment. The scale and importance of the machinery create unique socio-technical delivery challenges, leaving less room for experimentation than would be ideal. Implementing RKE2 was an opportunity to reduce risk and increase throughput by "learning through doing" rather than carefully planning changes in advance. On top of the physical hardware, the customer sells a software platform to host compute and analytics applications that aim to improve the yield in their customers' factories. This original software platform was built in a monolithic style. The software had to be delivered through air-gapped environments via a terminal while supervised. To increase delivery times, the customer moved to a pattern of Continuous Integration by breaking the single monolithic build and delivery process into a distributed, hierarchical "producer/consumer" model. The Continuous Integration pipeline is provided using Azure DevOps in combination with Rancher's RK2E engine for the Kubernetes package management.