C A S E S T U D Y

Albert HeijnCreating Agility in Retail with Kubernetes

80%reduction in management hours

80%reduction in testing time

99.95%uptime

Albert Heijn was founded more than 130 years ago in the Netherlands, and is now part of one of the world’s largest food retail groups — Ahold Delhaize — a leader in retail and e-commerce, and a company at the forefront of sustainable retailing. With more than 950 stores and an established online business (AH.nl), Albert Heijn is the leading food retailer in the Netherlands and has a presence in Belgium. Albert Heijn’s mission is to be the most loved and healthiest company in the Netherlands. The company has a clear focus on customer satisfaction — with a desire to inspire, surprise and provide rewarding experiences in all 900 localities where it has a presence.

Who is Albert Heijn?

“ Our teams use container orchestration to control and automate many tasks — everything from provisioning and deployment of containers to managing their redundancy and availability. This has enabled us to improve stability, speed up our development process and, consequently, deliver features to our customers faster, more cost-effectively and with a happier workforce.” Wilco Brandt, Head of Digital Development, Albert Heijn

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With an innovation-first and customer-centric strategy, the technology team at Albert Heijn has always put the needs of its customers first. The company is now at the forefront of container adoption in the retail space as it looks to the future of grocery shopping and how to best respond to market and environmental changes.

As head of the SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) Digital Development team at Albert Heijn, Joost Hofman and his team have been at the forefront of innovation in retail. In a constantly shifting environment, Albert Heijn is committed to omnichannel growth and achieving scale efficiencies to secure its long-term future. In the last 18 months, containers have become the preferred way for the company’s 200 developers to manage the continuous deployment process and run many services on AH.nl (web and mobile) in production.

Historically, the team ran its entire estate within a traditional, monolithic infrastructure which was becoming costly and unwieldy. They envisioned a unified microservices and open API platform, built and running in a scalable Kubernetes environment. Hofman knew the existing infrastructure couldn’t support these aspirations and so, in 2016, he started experimenting with containers.

After evaluating several options, Hofman and his team identified Kubernetes as the best fit for the business. As the hosting company couldn’t provide a Kubernetes cluster to order, Albert Heijn’s developers created their own, using home-grown tooling and a single server. They could now develop, test, accept and roll out software much more quickly in containers.

Over time, as more services were moved into the cluster, the team experienced stability and performance issues when they came to update. They quickly realized they needed to transition to a better cluster management solution.

The journey to containers

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In 2018, Hofman came to Rancher as the right platform to enable cloud migration and to help Albert Heijn manage its container estate more effectively. Major improvements in reliability were seen as a result — an uptime of 99.95 percent after just six months. Crucially, Rancher would allow management from one central point for both cloud and on-premise workloads. Spinning up the same cluster, with the same functionality only took one hour — the team was convinced.

Enhanced Security and Multi-Cluster Management

The fastest growing part of Albert Heijn’s business is its online e-commerce business. Hosting millions of visits to the site each month, AH.nl is managed by multiple development teams, all responsible for different categories and features. With 20 Kubernetes clusters to manage, all handling critical parts of the service, the main goals of the SRE team have been to automate, simplify, streamline and secure the management of its estate — all while boosting overall security and reliability. Historically, managing this number of clusters within a traditional environment would be time consuming and costly. Hofman estimates he would need five different teams to manage his infrastructure in the old paradigm.

What were the problems Albert Heijn was trying to solve?

“ As our business grew, we knew there would be economies in working with an orchestration partner. Rancher and Kubernetes have become enablers for the growth of our business.” Joost Hofman, Head of SRE Digital Development, Albert Heijn

Because Rancher brings a single, multi-cluster management approach, the team’s operational requirements are far more modest. The development team can manage the workload via Rancher’s core UI, and the SRE team can fully automate cluster management through the Rancher API’s. Crucially, development is also more secure as groups are directly connected via access rules. Updating, too, is a one-step process — one update serves the entire estate.

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Developers and engineers now save time in essential management, with the power to manage their own workloads in a permissions-based environment. For the teams responsible for developing new features, updates and services for mobile apps and e-commerce sites, this simplicity for developers has increased development velocity, has helped the team become highly efficient and has driven consistency across the Kubernetes environment.

This transformation has reduced management of their Kubernetes clusters hours by 80 percent in the last 12 months alone. Hofman also believes this shift left (the practice of finding and preventing issues as early as possible in the life cycle) has empowered his 200 developers to take control over infrastructure management in a way not possible before.

Sights on Reliability and Exponential Growth

Already attracting millions of customers to AH.nl each year, the team expects numbers to double in the coming years as more customers discover the benefits of online grocery shopping. Developing in containers is helping teams push new features and functionality to the e-commerce platform more quickly, directly improving the user experience and increasing loyalty.

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With increased engagement comes the need to scale; Kubernetes will allow the infrastructure to handle the expected dramatic increase in user numbers in the coming months and years. How? Automation of a host of basic processes (role-based access control [RBAC], Kubernetes-as-a-service [KaaS], authentication, application catalog, etc.) frees development teams to innovate but, more importantly, automates the scaling of features and services in response to demand.

This doesn’t mean developers aren’t close to their projects; Rancher provides live insights as to how every function is running. Using one central UI, developers working across the business can access the platform, view progress and make changes at any stage.

“ The future is cloud-based but we still want the flexibility to shift between cloud, serverless and on-premise developments. Rancher works across all these environments.” Joost Hofman, Head of SRE Digital Development, Albert Heijn

Finally, high availability is critical. All Albert Heijn customers rely on systems being available all year round. In a traditional environment, service reliability can sometimes be compromised when a company has to perform major updates. While updates can be scheduled for quiet periods, retail is a 24/7 concern.

With service reliability top of the priority list for AH.nl, the major mission is to move all features into a microservices-based environment built on Kubernetes and Rancher. This way, developers would be able to develop, test and deploy services in isolation of other features and ensure reliable and fast releases of newly created services.

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The challenge then becomes how to manage all those clusters in the cloud; especially if a move to other cloud providers could be in the long-term plan. Rancher supports a mixed multi-cloud/on-premise infrastructure. Even if AH.nl wants to move to other clouds, while maintaining a collection of on-premise clusters, Rancher manages this hybrid estate — across all these environments. This is critical for an organization that recognizes the benefits of moving to the cloud, but wants to retain control of on-premise systems.

AH.nl needs a way to rapidly scale its technology infrastructure in order to release new features faster and handle the increasing customer load. The team also wants to build resilience and high availability into its systems to ensure they meet their objectives, while freeing up time to be creative.

Crucially, AH.nl needs a partner to help it get the most out of Kubernetes, and to plan the long-term, cloud-based future of this international brand. Alongside Rancher, AH.nl has dramatically simplified its technology infrastructure to create a lean, agile environment for growth.

“ We have embraced containers, and Rancher, as a way to stay focused on innovation and remain ahead of the competition.” Joost Hofman, Head of SRE Digital Development, Albert Heijn

By providing a more flexible development environment, the company has been able to accelerate Azure cloud migration much faster than would have previously been possible. Most of all, Rancher has become a trusted partner for AH.nl, helping to enable Kubernetes-as-a-service for all developers.

What were the requirements from their chosen platform vendor?

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Journey

1. End of 2016, started experimenting with containers including early version of Rancher

2. Beginning 2017 elected to run upstream Kubernetes

3. 2018 chose Rancher to help orchestrate and expand Kubernetes usage

4. Short successful PoC executed in three weeks

5. Began working with Rancher early 2019

Benefits

• 80% reduction in management hours in last 12 months

• 80% reduction in testing time

• Improved availability; 99.95% up-time

• New instances created in minutes compared to legacy hardware;

• Central management point for all clusters

• Reducing complexity in public cloud migration

• Enhanced security

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How did they plan their migration to Rancher?

What have been the benefits?