Aussie Broadband retires costly proprietary cloud solutions for SUSE

Aussie Broadband has moved off VMware and built a private cloud platform using SUSE solutions to create a unified, scalable cloud hosting platform as part of a major IT transformation project.

The decision to go with SUSE came about as its VMware renewal loomed and it saw an opportunity to retire more costly proprietary solutions in favour of open source, noted Aussie Broadband.

Although the internet service provider (ISP) looked at a number of open source and commercial vendors, including options from Red Hat, VMware and Canonical, Aussie Broadband ultimately chose SUSE for its combination of performance, flexibility and support.

Additionally, Brisbane-based IT service provider and SUSE partner Adfinis was tapped to provide support on the project.

The infrastructure savings have also been significant, claimed Aussie Broadband general manager of transformation and cloud Ben O’Shea.

According to the ISP, by retiring VMware and streamlining its data centre footprint, Aussie Broadband has achieved meaningful cost reductions across hardware, power and software licensing.

“At the end of the day, SUSE has helped us achieve 20 to 30 per cent efficiency on our day-to-day operations,” said O’Shea.

Aussie Broadband chose Kubernetes to modernise operations, but early deployments using vanilla Kubeadm clusters proved unsustainable.

However, manual configuration made upgrades slow and painful while visibility was limited and SecOps raised concerns about security risks due to inconsistent processes.

“As a telco, we’re classified as an essential service, so any downtime within that ISP network is a big deal,” said O’Shea. “We needed a platform that could keep our core ISP and customer services running reliably, while improving the efficiency of the systems our teams depend on.”

Aussie Broadband was able to consolidate virtual machines and containerised workloads onto a single, unified platform using SUSE rancher prime as the control plane and building on RKE2, SUSE Virtualisation, SUSE Linux Micro and SUSE Security.

It now manages its technology assets with a single-pane-of-glass interface, improving visibility and performance across its operations.

“Delivering new virtual machines or new container instances can take anywhere from one to two days,” he said. “With the automation that we’ve been able to achieve on top of the SUSE platform, we’ve got that down to one to two hours.”

To support the transformation, Aussie Broadband also adopted SUSE Consulting Services and SUSE Platinum eLearning to ensure enterprise-level support and expert guidance throughout the transformation process.

Looking ahead, Aussie Broadband is continuing to expand its Kubernetes footprint, with deployments planned across more than ten facilities in five states.

The company is also exploring SUSE Telco Edge solutions to support strategic edge deployments, enhancing critical ISP workloads and AI capabilities with the SUSE AI platform to drive further innovation.

SUSE general manager for Australia and New Zealand Ben Henshall added that “Aussie Broadband is showing how open source can power smarter telco operations.”