How Grundfos is fueling water sustainability with Azure Kubernetes and SoftwareOne

Making a difference

Grundfos is a Danish company established in 1945 as a manufacturer of water pumps. Today, the organisation comprises 100 companies in 60 countries and employs nearly 20,000 people. Through a culture of innovation and sustainability, Grundfos works tirelessly to protect water resources around the world and contribute to the protection of our planet.

Water is one of the world's most precious resources. Today, 785 million people do not have basic access to water within a 30-minute walk from their homes. Ensuring that everyone has access to safe, managed drinking water is an immensely important goal. But it is also a huge challenge. One that Grundfos is not shying away from.

Scaling up

Grundfos is a global leader in water technology, focused on developing innovative solutions to help customers save natural resources and reduce their climate impact.

In a fast-paced world, Grundfos needs to be able to quickly and efficiently validate and test new ideas. To meet this need, the company has built a state-of-the-art Innovation Centre, where multiple teams develop commercial, domestic, district energy, and water utility applications for customers around the world. One example is “Commercial Wastewater” – an application that helps to improve water efficiency and reduce energy consumption in cities.

Given the size and complexity of the organisation, Grundfos needed an enterprise-scale development platform that could handle heavy and highly variable loads without sacrificing availability or cost control. The company also needed a single deployment framework to ensure compliance with security standards and company policies at scale.

With the goal of gaining a highly scalable application infrastructure, Grundfos chose to work with SoftwareOne to implement Microsoft Azure Kubernetes, a container orchestration platform that provides an optimal way to use the Azure cloud infrastructure and development platform.

Azure Kubernetes shortens release cycles and is faster to work with than Virtual Machines, making it the perfect choice for lean-agile development and building container-based solutions at scale.

Future-ready technology

Grundfos's new application development platform is a cloud-based, Kubernetes-based solution that meets the company's current challenges and is poised for future growth.

The solution provides a number of benefits, including:

• Flexibility: Services can be deployed to any Kubernetes cluster, regardless of the cloud provider.
• Security: Secretless coding and Azure Key Vault protect data, while Azure AD enforces authentication at the service level.
• Performance and cost optimisation: Open source components from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) allow Grundfos to monitor performance and ensure that all systems run smoothly, while extensive analytics enable the company to optimise costs as all resources are fully accountable.
• The platform is already being used by 18 teams to develop dozens of applications simultaneously, enabling them to build and deploy in an agile fashion and test and build new ideas faster.