Sam Beckett, Cloud Engineer at O.C. Tanner, is leading the effort to develop an open-source platform as a service (PaaS) solution for the company’s developers called Akkeris (link resides outside of ibm.com). Built upon Kubernetes, Akkeris makes it easy for developers to deploy code into production while taking care of compliance, authorization, auditing and add-on services like databases.

With over 1,500 deployments on the Akkeris platform, managing resources was not easy. Developers had to make decisions about how to size containers—educated guesses at best—which took time away from building revenue-generating functionality. The developers wanted to focus on creating new features and services, so it was understandable that when it came to resourcing decisions, they tended to overestimate how much they needed.

“Without Turbonomic it gets pretty hard,” says Beckett. “We’ve tried to give Developers recommendations in the past, providing basic metrics regarding network traffic, CPU utilization, memory usage and so on, but trying to assemble that into a recommendation for our users is very resource intensive and inconsistent. It is a real challenge.”

When O.C. Tanner implemented IBM Turbonomic, Beckett’s team and their developer colleagues no longer needed to crunch numbers to determine resource allocations. The IBM Turbonomic software understands the resource needs of applications and continuously determines the actions that ensure the apps get exactly what they need to perform. Every layer of the stack is analyzed and resourced based on real-time demand, from pods and services to containers to nodes, as well as the underlying Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure. With IBM Turbonomic continuously making container sizing decisions, Beckett and his team can present that information to their developers and have data-informed conversations about how to optimize their resources.

Likewise, Beckett has started to leverage IBM Turbonomic to manage his platform services running on Akkeris that the developers use to build their applications. “Our team has Kubernetes components that run the platform Akkeris,” explains Beckett. “We have a lot of services that we provide to developers and Turbonomic has helped me understand how to optimize those services.”

Next, Beckett and his team aim to leverage IBM Turbonomic’s API to map resizing actions to “t-shirt sizes” within their PaaS. Developers will be able to select the recommended t-shirt size as part of the self-service deployment—without needing to touch Kubernetes. “Turbonomic’s API has given us all of the data that we need in order to implement its recommendations into our PaaS, and we are really excited about the performance improvements and cost savings,” says Beckett.

O.C. Tanner (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a nearly century old organization that has digitally transformed its business. The company was founded in 1927 and got its start by selling class rings and pins to high school and college graduates. Today, O.C. Tanner develops employee recognition strategies and rewards programs that help companies appreciate people who do great work. One of the largest manufacturers of retail and corporate awards in the US, O.C. Tanner supports the environment, arts, education, children and organizations that are meaningful to its employees through charity.