For years, Fundaments has been at the forefront when it comes to development and innovations. Earlier this year, we formalised this further through our Office of the CTO: an ‘office’ with a lab where all kinds of innovations are developed by our colleagues. They can express their ideas and creativity herein and subsequently work on them with a team at specified times. These project teams, consisting of Cloud Engineers led by our CTO Larik-Jan Verschuren, are set up, on the one hand, to test and implement innovations and, on the other, to take our customers and partners on a journey in the continuously innovating IT world.
At Fundaments, we value innovations and personal contact. Therefore, we aim to launch at least five innovations every year; not only to stay relevant for our customers and partners, but also to share our innovation drive. The accompanying goal: to accelerate customers‘ and partners’ business.
Completed projects
This year, we have two projects linked to our vCloud Director platform. The first project concerns gaining more comprehensive insight into the performance of the workloads being hosted there. You can read more about it here. We also integrated an additional migration and disaster recovery service into the platform with vCloud Availability. Find out more here.
Container hosting
Currently, container hosting is a hot topic. Within our Office of the CTO, a number of projects are therefore running around this topic. An already somewhat longer project is the integration of Kubernetes clusters within vCloud Director. We are making good progress on this project and will soon dedicate an extensive blog item to it. So, keep a close eye on our website.
Through a vCloud Container Service Extension, we make it possible to deploy a Kubernetes cluster within our IaaS platform by a simple operation. Furthermore, we are working on integration projects with commonly used tooling. For instance, we are in the process of linking Rancher to vCloud Director and are trying to easily deploy the Fundaments infrastructure platform for Container hosting. Alternative concepts with e.g. VMware PKS are being rolled out in a proof-of-concept and we are trying to deploy in new, attractive business cases for a wide audience.
Back-up & Security
Fundaments already uses a highly scalable and innovative platform for backups using Cohesity. This platform offers increasing opportunities to include additional innovations to a widely used service known as backup. For instance, we are combining security concepts: scanning backups for viruses is one of them. By applying scanning techniques to data not used for production purposes, we make it possible to do analysis on data used without impacting production environments. All of this, packaged in a standard service.
Gathering feedback
Needless to say, our Office of the CTO also fulfils an important role in the partnerships Fundaments has woven into its services, which is: to help all our customers and partners move forward and offer them an enriched portfolio. Through various customer councils, linked to each project, we do a feasibility analysis on both a technical and commercial level. All this under our motto: #gobeyondbethebest!
