Project Name
Cut Licensing Costs by 60% with Rancher RKE2 Migration
Our client is a SaaS provider operating a multi-tenant application platform serving enterprise customers across North America, with a microservices architecture spanning over 200 containerised workloads.
Headquartered in the United States with approximately 200 to 500 employees, the company was experiencing rapid customer growth that was stressing both its infrastructure and its budget. Leadership sought to decouple from a single-vendor Kubernetes stack while preserving the security posture, compliance controls, and 24/7 support their enterprise clients demanded.
The ambition was clear: cut infrastructure overhead without cutting corners on reliability, and without triggering a single SLA breach for paying enterprise customers during the transition.
A per-core licensing model that penalised growth, proprietary abstractions that blocked portability, and a paying enterprise customer base that could not tolerate a single minute of unplanned downtime.
- Escalating Licensing Costs: OpenShift's per-core licensing model was on track to consume over 40% of the infrastructure budget as workloads scaled, with limited room for cost optimization.
- Vendor Lock-In: Heavy reliance on OpenShift-specific resources and tooling reduced portability and limited the organisation's flexibility to evaluate alternative platforms.
- Zero-Downtime Requirement: The platform supported enterprise customers under strict SLAs, requiring a migration approach that maintained 99.9% uptime throughout the transition.
- CI/CD and Ingress Re-Platforming: Existing build pipelines, deployment workflows, and ingress configurations were tightly coupled to OpenShift and required redesign for the target platform.
- Enterprise Support Requirements: The organisation needed vendor-backed support and guaranteed SLAs for the new Kubernetes platform to meet operational and compliance obligations.
- Skills and Change Management: Teams needed to transition from OpenShift-specific workflows to Rancher, RKE2, and Fleet without disrupting ongoing feature delivery.
Ksolves, an AI-first DevOps consulting services company, executed a phased, zero-downtime migration from OpenShift to a Rancher-managed RKE2 platform, replacing proprietary dependencies with CNCF-aligned technologies while retaining enterprise-grade support through Rancher Prime. The engagement covered workload assessment, application repackaging, GitOps implementation, CI/CD modernization, and a controlled production cutover over a three-month period.
- Workload Discovery and Dependency Mapping: Assessed 200+ workloads, CRDs, routes, and image streams to build a dependency map and identify migration risks before execution.
- Helm Chart Repackaging: Converted OpenShift-specific deployment configurations into standard Helm charts, creating a portable and vendor-neutral deployment model.
- Fleet GitOps Implementation: Deployed Rancher Fleet to enable GitOps-driven deployments, drift detection, and rollback capabilities across RKE2 environments.
- GitLab CI/CD Re-Platforming: Rebuilt pipelines using kaniko and Helm, replacing OpenShift-specific build processes while maintaining uninterrupted delivery.
- Ingress and TLS Migration: Replaced OpenShift Routes with NGINX Ingress and cert-manager, automating TLS provisioning and certificate renewals.
- Phased Canary Cutover: Migrated workloads through a staged traffic rollout, gradually increasing production traffic while using automated rollback safeguards to minimize risk.
Technology Stack
| Category | Technology |
|---|---|
| Platform | Rancher RKE2 |
| Architecture | Fleet |
| DevSecOps | GitLab CI |
| Methodology | Helm |
| DevSecOps | cert-manager + NGINX Ingress |
| Infrastructure | SUSE Rancher Prime |
From a licensing model that penalized growth and 18-minute deployment cycles to a 60% cost reduction, zero downtime, and faster, GitOps-driven releases.
- 60% Reduction in Platform Licensing Costs: Annual container platform costs dropped from $480,000 to $192,000, freeing $288,000 per year for product engineering and innovation.
- Zero-Downtime Migration of 200+ Microservices: Successfully migrated 200+ services over three months with no SLA breaches and uninterrupted service availability.
- 40% Faster Deployment Cycles: GitOps-driven deployments reduced average release times from 18 minutes to 11 minutes per service, accelerating delivery velocity.
- Multi-Cloud Portability Enabled: Rancher and RKE2 provide a consistent management layer across AWS, Azure, and on-premises environments, eliminating platform lock-in.
- Enterprise Support Retained at Lower Cost: Rancher Prime delivers SLA-backed enterprise support and compliance coverage without the high per-core licensing costs of the previous.
As infrastructure costs and platform dependencies grew, OpenShift had become a barrier to scalability rather than an enabler. Ksolves helped the organization transition to a Rancher-managed RKE2 platform, migrating 200+ microservices over three months with zero downtime and no SLA breaches. The migration reduced container platform licensing costs by 60%, improved deployment speed by 40% through GitOps automation, and eliminated vendor lock-in by enabling consistent operations across cloud and on-premises environments. With enterprise-grade support retained through Rancher Prime, the organization now has a scalable, cost-efficient Kubernetes foundation built for future growth.
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