Aussie Broadband has built a modern, cloud-native private cloud platform using SUSE Rancher Prime, SUSE Virtualisation and a number of other SUSE technologies, achieving 20–30% improvements in operational efficiency.
Founded in a regional Victorian living room in 2003, Aussie Broadband has grown into a publicly listed company with over 780,000 broadband connections, a team of more than 1,300 staff.
Now the fifth-largest retail internet provider in Australia, its rapid expansion, through both organic growth and acquisitions, resulted in a fragmented tech stack.
To stay competitive and maintain service reliability, Aussie Broadband launched a major IT transformation, with a goal to create a unified, scalable cloud hosting platform.
The company turned to Kubernetes to modernise operations, but early deployments using vanilla Kubeadm clusters proved unsustainable.
Manual configuration made upgrades slow and painful, 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 Ben O’Shea, general manager of transformation and cloud at Aussie Broadband.
“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,” said O’Shea.
Using SUSE Rancher Prime as the control plane, and building on RKE2, SUSE Virtualisation, SUSE Linux Micro, and SUSE Security, Aussie Broadband consolidated virtual machines and containerised workloads onto a single, unified platform.
The company 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,” said O’Shea. “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.”
Looking ahead, Aussie Broadband is continuing to expand its Kubernetes footprint, with deployments planned across more than ten facilities in five states.
