VSHN Product Portfolio

This page describes our product portfolio (targeted at VSHNeers), the rationale behind it, and what benefits each of these products brings to our customers. These products are a consequence of our identity.

Figure 1. The VSHN Product Portfolio Overview

A detailed product description is available under VSHN Products documentation.

AppFlow and AppOps

AppFlow: Software developers should be able to focus fully on developing code for their businesses. When deploying code in production is not part of their skill set, our expertise helps developers fulfill this task.

Continuously building and testing applications, properly packaging them into containers, and making them ready for deployment, isn’t easy, and not the domain of our customers' expertise. VSHN helps developers in engineering solid CI/CD pipelines, packaging their applications into properly designed container images, and writing Helm charts to make applications ready for deployment. We believe that fully automated processes are beneficial to our customers.

We can help customers get the best value out of our product offering, increasing customer satisfaction and sales.

More information on products.vshn.ch - VSHN AppFlow.
AppOps (Application Operations): AppOps takes care of applications, fulfilling a core task in the DevOps process. Applications deployed with AppOps receive actionable alerts about their behavior and state. It doesn’t matter where they are deployed, and they won’t receive alerts about "false positives." Platform and infrastructure alerts are taken care of by platform products like APPUiO or Managed OpenShift. AppOps ensures that low-level, day-2 operations happen automatically, such as backing up persistent storage, vulnerability scanning, scraping metrics, and more.

Through AppOps, we make sure there is always somebody to take care of applications, making sure they are running in the best conditions, all the time, 24/7.

With AppOps we offer our expertise to design and engineer the best matching cloud hosting environments, and are continuously and proactively making sure applications run smoothly. We react to pre-defined alerts with properly designed runbooks, so that our customers can spend their time developing applications and directly creating value for their customers.

More information on products.vshn.ch - VSHN AppOps.

Servala

Servala is two-fold: It enables Software Vendors to become SaaS-native and Cloud Providers and Private Enterprise Clouds to enhance their portfolio.

Software Vendors

Enable them to make their software available in self-service
Provide them tooling to make it easy
Give them access to many sales-channels through integration into Servala

Cloud Providers and Private Enterprise Clouds

Enhance their portfolio with added value
Make them able to offer additional services in full self-service
Enrich their offering with a multitude of software from software vendors

We already provide a wide range of services already available in the Servala through the Application Catalog.

This product was called "VSHN Application Catalog", now named Servala ("Service? Voilà!").

More information on products.vshn.ch - Servala and the Servala Website.

Application Catalog

The Application Catalog (in short AppCat) is our portfolio of cloud native managed services, available on APPUiO, Managed OpenShift and Servala.

It consists of industry-standard auxiliary services, required to run must software (like database, caches, etc.). Furthermore, it also provides custom SaaS software which we provide together with partners.

APPUiO

Developers should always and immediately have access to a hosting environment to run their applications. APPUiO provides such an environment as a Namespace-as-a-Service offering, with a number of always available shared Red Hat OpenShift clusters, based on Managed OpenShift. Getting access to these clusters is possible full self-service with self-sign-up processes.

APPUiO unlocks Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and all of its advantages, without having to cope with any of its complexities. No need to care about servers or infrastructure; just interact with the Kubernetes API and deploy your applications.

More information on products.vshn.ch - APPUiO.

Managed OpenShift

Red Hat OpenShift is a powerful, off-the-shelf Kubernetes-based PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) product, available to anyone to install and operate, but featuring a very complex and time-consuming operation needing lots of expertise. We believe that managing OpenShift clusters shouldn’t be the concern of our customers, and should be taken care of by dedicated experts, available round the clock with an SLA.

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 OpenShift clusters on different cloud infrastructures on behalf of our customers. Thanks to the quantity and quality of projects we manage, we have a deep 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 than our competitors.

More information on products.vshn.ch - Managed OpenShift.

Managed Kubernetes

Managed Kubernetes clusters from cloud service providers usually require lots of additional work to be ready for production and to unlock their full potential. We take care of all processes involved to have a production-ready Cloud Kubernetes environment, available within every cloud service provider.

There are many Cloud Kubernetes services available as a managed service control plane, like Amazon’s EKS, Azure AKS, Google GKE, or Exoscale SKS. But choosing between so many market players isn’t easy, given the many different feature sets, and the sometimes missing features needed for proper application hosting.

We enable our customers to use those platforms, without having to care about day-2 operations tasks like provisioning, configuration, Kubernetes lifecycle, monitoring, backup, and others. We augment these offerings with tooling to make the life of developers easier.

More information on products.vshn.ch - Managed Kubernetes.

Managed Services in VMs

There are certain services, software and requirements which don’t fit into an OpenShift or Kubernetes cluster, that’s where Managed Services in virtual machines (VMs) are being used. We use Puppet as configuration management to install, configure and managed services running in virtual machines. We’re able to run these managed services on nearly any infrastructure, we only need network access, an Ubuntu VM and root access (see products.vshn.ch - Requirements for more details).

We only support running services in VMs, and we prefer to not run them directly on hardware, because we have no means to monitor hardware and react on potential hardware issues.

Managed Services with Puppet is where we started when we founded the company.

More information on products.vshn.ch - Managed Services in VMs.

Support and Consulting

Support Plans

Our customers need support for our services, the support plans make that possible.

We help them to get the most out of our products and services. And when they struggle, they know who to ask, how, and where. Support plans define the details: how and when to reach us, what to expect, how much it costs, etc. Support plans are available to customers consuming recurring VSHN services.

More information on products.vshn.ch - Support Plans.

Cloud Native Consulting

The landscape of business and technology is continually changing, and as a VSHNeer, you are at the forefront of these shifts. Our primary business, managed services, forms the core of our offerings. Still, our consulting services have an equally critical role to play, both for our customers and for our business’s growth and sustainability.

For our customers, consulting services offer a personalized, expert perspective that enables them to navigate and leverage complex cloud-native technologies more effectively. This guidance is crucial for businesses that might not have the in-house expertise or resources to fully exploit these technologies. By offering consulting services, we’re not just providing a solution; we’re also educating our clients, empowering them to make informed decisions about their operations and strategies.

From a VSHNeer’s perspective, providing consulting services brings several benefits. Here’s how you can profit from this line of work:

Skill Development: Consulting provides an opportunity to broaden your skillset. You’ll encounter diverse client needs, challenges, and infrastructures, which will require you to stay updated with the latest trends and technologies.
Problem-Solving: Each client presents a unique set of problems, providing an exciting challenge and chance to sharpen your problem-solving skills.
Networking: As a consultant, you’ll interact with different clients and industry professionals, broadening your professional network and opening up potential career opportunities.
Job Satisfaction: There’s immense satisfaction in guiding businesses towards their goals, helping them grow, and witnessing the impact of your work.

As for how VSHN profits from these services:

Revenue Diversification: Consulting services provide an additional revenue stream, reducing reliance on our core managed services and making our business more resilient to market fluctuations.
Brand Enhancement: Successful consulting engagements help bolster our reputation as a comprehensive solutions provider, enhancing our brand and making us more attractive to potential clients.
Long-Term Customer Relationships: Consulting gives us a chance to work closely with our clients, understand their needs better, and build deeper relationships. These relationships often translate into long-term contracts and referrals.
Cross-selling Opportunities: Through our consulting engagements, we can identify clients' needs that could be met by our managed services, creating opportunities for cross-selling and upselling.

So, while consulting services may be a 'side business' for us, they play a pivotal role in our growth, sustainability, and reputation. It is a rewarding field that offers personal growth for our engineers and contributes significantly to our company’s bottom line.

While our aim at VSHN is to always accommodate our client’s needs, there are certain situations where we may need to decline a consulting request:

Lack of Expertise: Our primary objective is to deliver high-quality, value-adding services. If a consulting request involves a domain where we do not possess sufficient expertise or confidence to deliver the desired results, it is in the best interest of the client and our reputation that we respectfully decline. We value transparency and strive to provide services only in areas where we are certain we can make a positive impact.
Body Leasing: As a professional consulting firm, we do not engage in body leasing arrangements. We are committed to providing expert, tailored solutions for specific business needs, rather than merely supplying personnel. Our focus is on quality consulting work, which goes beyond just staffing client projects.
On-Site Work Requests: Our operation model is primarily remote, as detailed in our remote working policy. We believe this offers us the flexibility to work with a wide range of clients while maintaining our work-life balance. Therefore, requests for continuous on-site engagements may not align with our operational strategy and may be politely declined.
Availability of VSHNeers: The value we deliver through our consulting work heavily relies on the right match between client needs and our engineers' expertise. If we cannot find an available VSHNeer who is adequately qualified and can meet the client’s needs within the requested timeline, we may have to say no to the consulting request.

In all these situations, it’s crucial that we handle these conversations with utmost respect and transparency, leaving the door open for potential future collaborations. If possible, we could also consider referring the client to a trusted partner who could cater to their requirements better.

More information on products.vshn.ch - Consulting.

Reselling

We resell the products of several partner vendors. These software vendors operate in the same markets as VSHN.

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