What is LOKI?
Loki is a god in Norse mythology; he is known as a troublemaker and a shapeshifter. In the Marvel franchise he is known as a fictional character portrayed by Tom Hiddleston, though his character is based on the Norse mythological god of the same name.
In the open source industry we know LOKI as Linux OpenStack Kubernetes Infrastructure; the most awesome Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud. These giants in open source technology are a great combination since both the technologies are complementary to each other. OpenStack and Kubernetes solve problems that are similar in nature but on different layers of the stack, so combining these gives users more scalability and automation than ever before.
I thought it would be interesting to share some information about a typical LOKI case study, we worked on together with one of our clients.
Why LOKI?
A while back we were contacted by the ministry of education that was planning on deploying a private cloud. Because they needed to keep up with rapid developments, they needed to change the technology every four years in order to keep up. Of course, keeping it up like this is a good thing as, it is very important to keep up with rapid developments in order to avoid stagnation in any profession and to ensure that you keep moving forwards, toward reaching your full potential. However, in this case it came with a downside as well, as the costs for these changes were around 2.5 million euro’s for each change, every four years. They were looking for a way to grow in a strategic way rather than keeping renewing their cloud components and migrating to a new setup.
Furthermore, before we started working together, the integration and deployment processes of the client were mostly manual, with many human interventions required at every stage. As a result, development and testing was not as speedy as desired, and deployment speeds affected the team’s ability to deliver new, valuable services.
How to implement LOKI
The client contacted us thinking, maybe there might also be further improvements possible. After sitting down with the client, we collectively decided to undertake a private cloud based, digital transformation initiative and replace its existing developer private cloud components with an open source cloud solution. After this the project was to migrate all applications to the new open source cloud platform. Furthermore, by changing the strategy to an open source cloud strategy, the client was able to not only reduce operational costs drastically but also to reduce support costs, save time and make an end to infrastructure vendor lock-ins.
Another matter of improvement that we helped the client with was that they wanted to continuously develop and deliver new value. Thus, we helped them to become more agile. It is important to work in an agile way in order to be able to keep up with the best practices at creating value through IT in the public sector. With this said, OpenStack cloud technology and Agile methods complement each other perfectly. Private cloud technologies enable enterprise agility, and vice versa building and expanding the OpenStack cloud requires working agile and responsive.
After implementing LOKI
After the implementation of the Linux, KVM, OpenStack and Ceph cloud and the migration of applications and workflows, we were asked to also integrate a container platform into the infrastructure; making the cloud LOKI (Linux, OpenStack, Kubernetes, Infrastructure). We are proud at the fact we helped the client setting up the LOKI infrastructure and are now providing proactive services such as daily health checks, periodic reporting, continuous service improvement, as well as 24*7 proactive monitoring and on call availability.
Furthermore, the client plans to continue building on the initial success and acclaim of its platform to achieve further benefits as part of its goal to provide the best services and products through data supported, innovative digital transformation.
And lastly, if you want to understand the use of LOKI some more in context, and would like to read another casestudy, you can do that through the following link: https://fairbanks.nl/loki-openshift-on-openstack-egress-ip-address-per-project/
If you have any questions about LOKI or one of the components, feel free to contact our company representative, Michiel Manten. You will find his LinkedIn page through the following link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michielmanten