CASE STUDY:
Aerospace Leader Builds a Secure Development Platform with Mirantis Kubernetes Engine
Mirantis Kubernetes Engine gives an aerospace industry leader an on-prem container platform that drives their secure software supply chain–with global impact.
Bringing containers to one of the world’s largest aerospace companies
As a global leader in aerospace and defense, this company’s work is the definition of mission-critical. Their large international team requires IT infrastructure with ironclad security and reliability, driving applications around the world and even in orbit. When the aerospace leader looked to leverage Kubernetes, they had the strictest requirements. They would need to be able to run clusters not only in the cloud, but in a secure environment on-prem, so developers would have a pre-production system aligned with their cloud environment. When they investigated solutions, they were struck by the platform now known as Mirantis Kubernetes Engine—and its support for both the Swarm and Kubernetes container orchestrators. “It was nice that it had both Swarm and Kubernetes,” says one team leader. “It can be hard to just jump into Kubernetes, so it’s nice to have Swarm to get familiar with basic concepts and get started.”
Secure and reliable
The aerospace leader’s team started using Swarm and Kubernetes with enterprise support in 2018. “Being that this is such a new technology,” says the team leader, “it was very helpful at the time to have tech support engineers to come over and help us with the actual cluster set up. That helped us tremendously.” With their container platform up and running, an essential piece of the company’s infrastructure stack was a trusted container registry–in this case, Mirantis Secure Registry. They needed automated scanning and verification for container images, enforcing exclusive use of curated components to create what is known as a secure software supply chain. Such a supply chain enables a team to build quickly and with confidence in their tools; this was a fundamental requirement for the company’s infrastructure solution, and Mirantis Secure Registry enabled them to do just that. It was important for the team to be able to rely on a supported product, as well. That allowed them to move quickly and deliberately. “When you run into a problem,” says the team leader, “it’s worth the business to be able to call someone or create a ticket. And Mirantis Kubernetes Engine is really a wonderful product. It definitely helps with our on-prem development; it makes sense for us to do it on-prem, and it’s helped us to migrate things to the cloud.” As this aerospace leader builds out cloud native applications and services, they have a trusted partner in Mirantis, helping them leverage containers securely and reliably–and deploy their applications around the world, and beyond.
Challenge
Needed an on-prem container platform that could support a secure software supply chain
Solution
Mirantis Kubernetes Engine, with enterprise support and dual-orchestrator functionality to run Swarm and Kubernetes, plus Mirantis Secure Registry for security features
Results
A platform that helped the team adopt containers and expand into Kubernetes, while pre-empting security problems common to “open” container development
Additional Case
