Client Spotlight: Scale Computing accelerates customer adoption with Ansible integration

To enable its customers to remotely deploy applications to multiple sites simultaneously, Scale Computing decided to enhance its product with Ansible integration. To achieve the best possible result, they decided to trust XLAB Steampunk to develop the Ansible Collection. Did we live up to their expectations and help them achieve desired outcomes? What was it like working with us?

In today’s client spotlight, we talk to Dave Demlow, Vice President of product strategy at Scale Computing.

Meet Scale Computing

Scale Computing is a leader in edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions for customers around the globe. Their HyperCore software eliminates the need for traditional virtualization software, disaster recovery software, servers, and shared storage, replacing these with a fully integrated, highly available system for running applications.

Goal: Help clients shorten roll out times

A lot of Scale Computing customers have autonomous clusters of IT infrastructure, highly distributed in, for example, thousands of retail stores or ships with limited or no connectivity, for weeks or months at a time, all without any IT personnel on-site. The applications their clients are running are becoming much more dynamic and they need to be able to quickly and remotely deploy new applications to thousands of sites at once and have it up and running in months as opposed to what used to be a multi-year process. Scale Computing decided to help clients solve this challenge by complementing their product with Ansible.

Trust the integration to the Leading Ansible experts

Scale Computing experimented with building Ansible Collection themselves, but they quickly realized that building a quality collection is a much bigger project than they wanted to tackle internally.

“Building the Ansible Collections successfully, so that they’re scalable and truly meet the goal of simplifying the task of the user, would take resources that as a company we didn’t want to invest internally. Becoming Ansible experts obviously takes time and skills,” explains Dave.

After talking to several partners, it became clear that XLAB Steampunk being exclusively focused on Ansible-related technologies was the right choice. Seeing some of the collections we had done was very convincing and positive for them. They felt we can deliver the Ansible expertise they were looking for.

“I was confident XLAB Steampunk has the right expertise and could do this better, faster, and cheaper than we can,” he adds.

High-quality collection with ongoing support

We worked together to build the full CI/CD pipeline, with built in integration testing and documentation. Scale chose additional optional ongoing support with their service: “Everything is automatically and continuously tested with updates. We were left with not just a one-time project,” says Dave.

He continues: “If we do find issues with the existing collection, we know that we have access to XLAB to address any defects we would find. The same goes for enhancements that are required. If we found little issues, the turnaround time has really been amazing.”

Solve problems without having to know how

Working with Ansible experts relieves you from knowing much about Ansible or how is a high-quality collection supposed to look like. You can simply define problems you want to solve without having to know how. We define the user stories together and then design and develop the collection around them.

“XLAB team came up with different alternatives, pros, and cons, and then ultimately worked with us to agree on the right solution. The team has been extremely knowledgeable, flexible and reactive. They advised us on what the collection should do, how to properly structure it, how to make it best to integrate with Ansible, what the expectations of the Ansible community are, as well as advise us on subjects like Red Hat Certification that we had no experience with,” says Dave.

Make an impact on your business

Large customers, where given the previous methodologies, might plan to roll out across all their sites over the next two or three years. Utilizing an Ansible Collection can help them turn a multi-year deployment into a couple of months. Not only does this provide the benefits of getting new applications deployed more quickly, but it also accelerates revenue and customer adoption for Scale Computing as well.

“We definitely expect new business and to shorten our customers roll out times. That obviously accelerates our revenue and customer adoption. This integration is key both to winning new business and accelerating the deployment of new systems,” adds Dave.

If you think that you could benefit from partnering with us, just like Scale Computing did, drop us a line , and let’s talk!