Leonidas Utilizes Kontena Container Platform to Deliver Customer Projects More Efficiently

“The Leonidas Platform is an essential part of our business, to be able to confidently operate our own products and projects. Kontena is a very integral aspect of making this happen, as our platform requires a highly integrated environment including loadbalancing and networking, all of which Kontena offers in one, easy-to-use package”.

Leonidas Oy is an extended reality (XR) tech company with top notch expertise in all things XR. Utilizing virtual, augmented and mixed realities to create customized applications, enables them to transport you to a different world, place and time with their VR solutions; while their AR solutions add digital elements to the world around you. Lastly, their MR solutions merge beneficial and experiential digital functionalities with reality.

Leonidas utilizes Kontena as the foundation for their own Leonidas platform but also uses it to effortlessly deploy and run customer projects, giving them a competitive edge.

The Challenge

Previously, Leonidas hosted customer projects directly on top of different virtual machine infrastructures while deploying the services utilizing in-house automation scripts. Some time ago Leonidas decided to seek the benefits of a platform approach which could be used to easily host customer applications and allow the easy sharing of common services between the various projects.

As a relatively small consulting house without a dedicated team to operate and maintain the platform, Leonidas needed a solution that was as-easy-as-possible to understand, maintain and operate. This would allow their project teams to concentrate on delivering their customers’ high quality XR applications rather than spending time setting up and maintaining the system.

Having a strong DevOps mentality, Leonidas were well acquainted with containers and the advantages they offered, and realized that a container management solution was the answer they were looking for to help manage their Leonidas Platform and host their customer projects.

The Solution

When looking for a container orchestration solution, Leonidas narrowed it down to two options after discarding other well-known platforms for being needlessly complex and requiring too much time to learn.

While they initially leaned more towards another popular container platform, they soon realized that Kontena was the better fit for them. Being able to combine Kontena with their own Leonidas Platform, to build a definite solution, ensured they were able to get up and running much faster with Kontena; in testing, it took only one third of the time when compared to testing with the other platform option.

“The Leonidas Platform is an essential part of our business, to be able to confidently operate our own products and projects. Kontena is a very integral aspect of making this happen, as our platform requires a highly integrated environment including loadbalancing and networking, all of which Kontena offers in one, easy-to-use package,” says Santtu Pajukanta, Software Developer at Leonidas Oy.

The Implementation

Leonidas’ current Kontena environment consists of a handful of worker nodes running over 30 services and utilizing over 50 containers. Their Kontena based environment brings them significant savings both in infrastructure costs, as well as in needed maintenance resources. While integrated with deployment pipeline tooling, Kontena is used to deploy and run services such as WordPress, SMS gateway, databases, as well as many custom Ruby-on-Rails and Node.js applications. Managing and running these containerized services on Kontena allows them to be conveniently and easily shared across Leonidas’ customer projects, further saving time and resources.

Leonidas finds particular value in Kontena’s “all-batteries-included” approach especially with built-in DNS, networking, and VPN services. Leonidas also loves Kontena’s ‘gloves-off’ approach to Let’s Encrypt certificates. “Let’s Encrypt is a great service that we at Leonidas use with pleasure in services where there are not, for example, any “EV” certificate requirements. Kontena makes using Let’s Encrypt very automated and enjoyable!”

Using Kontena’s CLI tool feels only natural to Leonidas and they find it to be a very positive feature: “We are operating with a strong DevOps mentality and are working on many smaller projects concurrently. We use Kontena’s CLI heavily to navigate in and between the projects and it’s very natural and comes in handy to us,” Pajukanta explains.

In addition Leonidas finds Kontena’s support very valuable to resolve any issues that sometimes arise. “We’ve also been happy with the responsiveness to the issues we’ve created in GitHub. When we’ve hit some bugs, the issues are discussed and dealt with appropriately and swiftly,” praises Pajukanta.

By using Kontena’s solution, Leonidas are able to serve their customers faster and more efficiently, thus increasing their strategic competitive advantage.

Summary

About Leonidas

Leonidas is the leading strategic extended reality (“XR”) provider, utilizing virtual, augmented and mixed realities to create customized applications for global tech companies.

Need

An easy to use and understand container management platform to run both their own Leonidas platform as well as host customer projects; a platform that allows Leonidas project teams to focus 100% on delivering high quality XR applications.

Solution Benefits

Kontena provided Leonidas with an easy to understand, use and maintain container platform to build their own Leonidas platform on and also to effortlessly deploy and run customer projects on. Kontena offered Leonidas unbeatable time, money and resource savings, thus increasing their competitive advantage.

Image Credits: Drew Graham.

Want to try Kontena out?

Sign up to Kontena Cloud now to get $25 of free credits to run a fully hosted Kontena Platform to try out. Kontena provides the most easy-to-use, fully integrated solution for DevOps and software development teams to deploy, run, monitor and operate containers on the cloud. It is used by hundreds of startups and software development teams working for some of the biggest enterprises in the world. www.kontena.io.