VSHN Product Portfolio

This page describes our product portfolio, why we offer them and what they actually do. These products are a reaction to our Key Drivers and Key Deliverables.

Figure 1. The VSHN Product Portfolio Overview

A detailed product description is available under VSHN Products documentation.

VSHN

Under the VSHN brand we offer services which are running inside already existing Kubernetes clusters, usually provided by products from the APPUiO brand.

VSHN AppFlow

Applications need to be packaged, tested and deployed.

Product Vision

To assist software developers bringing code from development to production.

Software developers should be able to focus on developing code for their businesses. Bringing code from development to production is usually too generic to be part of their core business. Our expertise helps developers with that.

Continuously building and testing applications, properly packaging them into containers and making them ready for deployment isn’t easy and usually not the domain of our customers' expertise. That’s why we help them with engineering solid CI/CD pipelines, packaging their applications into properly designed container images and writing Helm Charts to make the application ready for deployment. We believe that the whole automation process repeats between applications. Learnings from the automation processes of one application can be brought to others.

We can help the customer to get the best value out of our other product offerings and bring more workload to our products.

More information on products.docs.vshn.ch.

VSHN AppOps

Applications need to be taken care of.

Product Vision - Draft

To design and react to actionable alerts so that applications can run smoothly.

Taking care of an application is part of DevOps, and we complement that with our product. A deployed application that has AppOps enabled, in return gets actionable alerts concerning the application. It does not matter where the application comes from. It will not receive alerts on false positives. Platform alerts and infrastructure alerts are taken care of by platform products like APPUiO. Low-level Day-2 operations such as backing up persistent storage, vulnerability scanning, scraping metrics, and others happen automatically.

Someone has to take care of the deployed applications and make sure that they are running in a perfect environment, all the time, 24/7. Otherwise, they might break.

With this product we offer our expertise to design and engineer the best matching cloud hosting environment and are continuously and proactively making sure the application runs smoothly. We react to pre-defined alerts with properly designed runbooks so that our customer can spend their precious time to develop applications and directly create value for their customers.

Deploying applications to Kubernetes isn’t easy, as the default primitives given by it are very low-level and complex (but allow for full flexibility). With an application hosting platform, which builds on top of Kubernetes, we can simplify this complication and ease the pain of running application on Kubernetes.

More information on products.docs.vshn.ch.

VSHN AppCat

Applications need supporting services.

Product Vision

To enable software developers consume services immediately.

Developers must be able to consume services directly where they are needed. It’s not reasonable to wait until a service is manually provisioned. Service provisioning must happen immediately and should be fully automated. We make that possible by automating every aspect of consuming supporting services: provisioning, providing connection details, billing, backup, monitoring, maintenance, decommissioning, and any other Day-2 operation tasks. It complements APPUiO Cloud and APPUiO Managed.

Applications usually need databases, caches, queues, indexes, and other services to work correctly. In our application catalog, we offer a variety of such services, available to be ordered in self-service. Over time the application catalog could be enhanced to offer services of our partners, as well as SaaS software like a Managed GitLab to support the development lifecycle.

By making these services and applications available in self-service, we enable users of our application catalog to be independent of any waiting time on manual action.

Services in the application catalog can either be offered by a cloud service provider or made by us:

Cloud Services brokering: We resell services from Cloud Service provider in our application catalog. The added value we give to the user is self-service ordering, taking care of billing and pre-configuring the service with our best-practices.
Self-Made Managed Services: Services made by our own, which could be in the form of a Kubernetes Operator, an instantiated Helm Chart or any other workload which runs on Kubernetes.

Furthermore, the Application Catalog product offers a framework to easily add new services to the catalog.

More information on products.docs.vshn.ch.

APPUiO

Applications need a platform to run on.

Under the APPUiO brand, we offer platform products with Kubernetes to give applications an environment to run and get operated. It’s the foundation of the VSHN-branded products above.

APPUiO Cloud

Product Vision

To provide software developers an immediate 24/7 access to a hosting environment to run their application.

Developers should always and immediately have access to a hosting environment to run their application. APPUiO Cloud provides such an environment with a number of always available shared Red Hat OpenShift clusters. The clusters are fully self-service with self-sign-up. It provides a way to use Red Hat OpenShift with all the advantages it brings, without having to cope with the complexity such an environment brings with it. No caring about servers or infrastructure needed, just talk with the Kubernetes API.

We provide Kubernetes Namespaces (OpenShift Projects) which can be used to deploy applications into. This is solely based on OpenShift, as it leverages the hardened multi-tenancy features of it. It is built upon APPUiO Managed OpenShift.

More information on products.docs.vshn.ch.

APPUiO Managed OpenShift

Product Vision

To provide dedicated managed OpenShift clusters on any infrastructure.

Red Hat OpenShift is an of-the-shelve software which can be bought and installed by anyone, but operating it is very complex, needs a lot of expertise and is time-consuming. Because of that we believe that this shouldn’t be the concern of our customers and should be taken care of by dedicated experts around the clock with an SLA.

When there are only virtual machines available, we choose Red Hat OpenShift to provide managed Kubernetes clusters. By stating that we provide it on any infrastructure, we strive to bring Kubernetes to places where it isn’t available yet.

We run many instances of OpenShift on many infrastructures. Thanks to quantity, we get an intimate knowledge of OpenShift. A knowledge one does not get by just operating one or just a few clusters on one single infrastructure. Armed with that knowledge, we are able to overall provide a better service.

More information on products.docs.vshn.ch.

APPUiO Managed Kubernetes Services

Product Vision

To take care of all the involved processes to have a production ready Cloud Kubernetes environment available, with every available Cloud Kubernetes service provider.

Managed Kubernetes clusters from cloud service providers usually need a lot of additional work to be ready for production and utilize their full potential. We take care of all the involved processes to have a production ready Cloud Kubernetes environment available with every available Cloud Kubernetes service offering.

Using a Cloud Kubernetes offering usually involves turning the right knobs and writing automation tooling to spin-up the cluster, configure it with best-practices and continuously keep up when the vendor moves on.

There are many Cloud Kubernetes services that are already integrated and available as a managed service control plane. The many different feature sets throughout all offering and often missing features which are needed for a proper application hosting platform, doesn’t make these offerings easy.

We enable the user of such a platform to not have to care about Day-2 operations tasks like provisioning, configuration, Kubernetes lifecycle, monitoring, backup, and others. We enrich these offerings with toolings to make the life of developers easy and let them be prepared to onboard the application.

More information on products.docs.vshn.ch.

Support Plans

Our customers need support and with support plans we make that possible. We help them with our support to get the best of our products and when they struggle, they know where and who to ask. The support plan defines the details (how and when to reach us, what to expect, what it costs, …). Support plans are only available for customers having other VSHN products and are per customer.

More information on products.docs.vshn.ch.

Reselling

We partner with several vendors for which we resell their products. These are usually software vendors which are in the same niche as VSHN provides the services for.

GitLab licenses: GitLab
NGINX Application Platform licenses: F5
SUSE Rancher subscriptions: SUSE Rancher
Cloud resources: Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, cloudscale.ch, Exoscale, Swisscom

An Analogy

Imagine we are a restaurant that specializes in pizza, that is, a pizzeria. To make a good pizza we need a dough and a topping with different ingredients.

Now imagine that the dough is the foundation, just like in our case the APPUIO-branded Kubernetes cluster. You can choose different kind of dough (White flour, multigrain flour, gluten-free flour and others), but every kind serves the same purpose, just like you can choose different kind of APPUiO-branded products, every kind offering you a Kubernetes cluster, the foundation.

Then on top of the dough you put the toppings as you wish. The same with our products: On top of the APPUiO-branded product you put the VSHN-branded products as they fit.

You can’t have a pizza without a dough, you need it to put the toppings onto. And similar you need an APPUiO-branded product, to be able to put VSHN-branded product on top of it.