Nokia’s R&D engineers needed a robust cloud platform for their work. Partnering with Kumorion, the team built what has become one of the world’s largest private clouds: a one-million-CPU environment that sets industry benchmarks in cost efficiency, control and automation.
Back in 2011, networks giant Nokia began exploring how to modernize its digital R&D environments. The company’s engineers use heavy computing resources to work on software builds and perform integration testing.
At the time, these resources were running on thousands of servers and scattered across some 50 sites worldwide. The setup was difficult and costly to manage, so moving to the public cloud seemed the likely way forward.
But as the project team looked into available options, setting up a private cloud environment began to look more appealing. With open-source software for the private cloud just beginning to mature, the engineers set about creating a cloud of their own.
“Our R&D builds had grown to as large as 200 gigabytes. Just moving that amount of data to and from the public cloud can take an hour or more. Speeding up development cycles was one of our major goals, but the public cloud would have just slowed us down,” explains Janne Heino, Head of Nokia Services Cloud Architecture.
“We promised that we would fail fast if the private cloud did not work. But on the contrary, we very quickly realized it was the better path forward. This is how the private Nokia Enterprise and Services Cloud was born,” says Heino, who has managed the project from day zero.
Heino then began looking for a partner to help develop the private environment. This is how Kumorion came into the picture.
Promises kept, scale delivered
To win over internal stakeholders, Heino’s team had framed the private cloud project around three simple promises.
The first was that Nokia would get three times more R&D capacity for the same investment. To be this cost effective, the environment would need to run extremely efficiently. The second promise was that the engineers would have full admin access to their cloud resources – allowing them to make changes and fix issues within the same day. Finally, Heino’s team promised that the team would automate whatever they could.
“Nokia was essentially looking for partners that could enable this promised environment at scale,” recalls Kumorion CTO and Founder, Timo Ahokas.
“This was about more than being a contractor providing infrastructure support. The company needed a team that understood the nuances of open-source software development and operations at the system level. We excel in these areas,” he says.
More than 13 years later, that early technical fit has grown into a deep engineering partnership. While Nokia retains responsibility for datacenter and other hardware-level processes, Kumorion has designed and implemented many of the automated managed services – including the Nokia Kubernetes Service. This platform handles everything from provisioning and upgrades to logging, metrics and self-healing of some 400 clusters.
“Kumorion’s combination of expertise is quite hard to find,” says Heino. “We need engineers who know infrastructure deeply, but who also want to code. And we need hardware specialists who are able to automate everything. These are not typical profiles, but Kumorion has been able to attract developers who are inspired by this kind of work.”
The private cloud pays off
Heino estimates that Nokia is able to run its private cloud at less than 40% the cost of the public equivalent. The savings come from eliminating licensing fees, optimizing hardware and automating day-to-day operations. This control comes with the added benefit of strong security and efficiency – sensitive R&D workloads are kept under Nokia’s governance.
“We handle everything – including the data centers, electricity, support, security, etc. – so we have a very good understanding on the total cost of ownership. We would not be using the private cloud if it wasn’t cheaper” says Heino.
What began as an experiment has now become a core enabler of Nokia’s global R&D. Managing the environment requires frequent deployment cycles and a growing level of automation, with the team striking the right balance between current and future needs.
“There’s an ongoing conversation about what we need now and what we’ll need next. We do not want to do manual work if it can be avoided. Kumorion brings that same mindset. If something can be automated, they’ll automate it,” says Heino.
The Kumorion team has essentially built automation applications that replace the roles of system admins and operators. It’s a managed service approach that enables any private cloud environment to scale as needed – without adding complexity.
“We’re not saying the private cloud is right for every use case. An increasing number of companies in fact have a hybrid approach, using both the public and private clouds,” explains Ahokas. “If there are workloads or data you want closer to home and under your own control, Kumorion can make that possible without it becoming an operational burden. With the right skills and tools, the private cloud absolutely makes sense at scale.”
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