Accelerating Software
Delivery and Reducing Costs

On-site platform enablement and direct collaboration with the customer team on cloud-native technologies, and enterprise support in maintenance of the entire stack

The agency leverages cloud-native technologies to build and maintain secure, reliable, and scalable applications that affect the everyday life of millions of people in the Netherlands. This level of responsibility obligated Rijkswaterstaat to use only proven software products provided by trusted partners.

The Dutch Ministry possesses in-house teams fluent in cloud-native technologies and working with Pivotal Cloud Foundry as the main platform for building and managing applications in the organization. In the meantime, the agency was receiving reoccurring requests from the development team to equip their toolset with a Kubernetes cluster. While getting more familiar with opportunities gained when using containers to deploy applications, Rijkswaterstaat has decided to look for platforms that empower organizations to use Kubernetes and Open Source Cloud Foundry with enterprise support at the same time.

By offering these technologies along with a complete cloud-native stack and providing an experienced team of cloud-native experts to collaborate with, Cloudboostr has become a natural choice for Rijkswaterstaat.

Using Cloudboostr, RWS puts its mission-critical systems on Kubernetes to speed up application development, reduce costs, and ensure safety.

Cloudboostr is built as a combination of custom code, automation, configuration templates, and trusted architectural patterns. By providing Rijkswaterstaat with a complete cloud-native stack that consists of Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, and open source tools to maintain their cloud operations, the team developing the Cloudboostr platform started the collaboration with a stage dedicated to getting to know customer requirements, discuss the details, and customize the platform accordingly to Rijkswaterstaat needs.

Along with the installation process, both teams collaborated on knowledge exchange, verifying how Cloudboostr works with other systems used by the Ministry and facing the real use cases that occur in the areas where Rijkswaterstaat provides its services. As the platform is developed by a team of experts that participated in various projects run by the Grape Up team, expertise gathered by years helped to solve some challenges and enable Rijkswaterstaat’s teams to move forward. It’s the part of the offering provided by Grape Up when delivering the Cloudboostr platform that can’t be gained by teams that decide to use open source technologies on their own, without enterprise support.

After installing Cloudboostr on the Rijkswaterstaat’s infrastructure, development teams at the agency can use clusters and work with containers. Cloudboostr enables Rijkswaterstaat to put a mission-critical system on Kubernetes, working on top of the Cloudboostr platform. That opens up new opportunities to significantly accelerate software delivery, reduce time-to-market for new services, reacting quickly to the requests reported by users, and providing safe and reliable services. Along with quality and agility improvements, by using Cloudboostr, Rijkswaterstaat can narrow down the cost of cloud infrastructure as Cloudboostr gives the agency an easy way to migrate to Open Source Cloud Foundry which is a huge saving in comparison to commercial platforms.

Rijkswaterstaat continues to collaborate with the Grape Up team, as part of the cooperation obligates Grape Up to provide enterprise support for Cloudboostr.