Municipality of Eindhoven accelerates digital services with SUSE and Fundaments
The Municipality of Eindhoven, in collaboration with Fundaments, has migrated its key business processes to a microservices architecture. Thanks to a new platform based on the SUSE Rancher Suite, delivered as a fully managed service in a sovereign data center, development processes have become three times faster.
Modernizing services through containers
Across the Netherlands, municipalities are striving to deliver more responsive and effective public services within increasingly tight budgets. Like many other government organizations, the Municipality of Eindhoven sees technology as an opportunity to streamline service delivery and more actively involve residents in local government.
Previously, Eindhoven relied on monolithic applications for a wide range of tasks, from social services to passport applications. However, these applications were becoming increasingly complex, expensive to maintain, and difficult to integrate with other platforms used by other municipalities or government organizations.
To accelerate the delivery of new digital services, Eindhoven opted for a new development approach. Following DevOps principles, the municipality wanted to transition to applications based on microservices, running in Docker containers and managed with Kubernetes.
Over the past two years, Eindhoven has worked with Fundaments for the delivery, management, and maintenance of its infrastructure. From a secure data center in Eindhoven, Fundaments provides an Infrastructure as a Service platform for business-critical applications, supported by SLAs.
Building on this successful partnership, Eindhoven asked Fundaments to assist in the transition from monolithic applications on virtual machines to microservices on containers.
Eindhoven formulated a number of requirements for Fundaments. One of these was that the new functionality had to align with the standards and best practices of Common Ground, a collaboration between public and private parties, including municipalities, IT suppliers, and technology companies.
Ron Boscu, Manager of Marketing and Sales at Fundaments: “The goal of Common Ground is to help municipalities improve their service delivery, comply with the latest privacy legislation, and become resilient against ever-changing cyber threats by streamlining information provision. To achieve these goals, municipalities must transform their data processing — from isolated, monolithic systems to integrated microservices.”
To formalize the Common Ground approach, the Association of Netherlands Municipalities (VNG) developed Haven: a standard for platform-independent cloud hosting for Dutch municipalities. Haven is part of the Common Ground program and enables municipalities to develop interoperable and reusable applications based on microservices.
“Eindhoven wanted a Kubernetes cluster that complies with the Haven standard,” explains Larik-Jan Verschuren-Parchomov, CTO at Fundaments. “In addition, it was essential to ensure data sovereignty — which ruled out the use of a hyperscaler.”
Why SUSE Rancher Suite?
After evaluating containerization platforms from various leading vendors, Fundaments chose the SUSE Rancher Suite. This suite of integrated solutions for deploying, managing, and securing both enterprise Kubernetes environments and traditional virtual environments includes SUSE Rancher Prime, SUSE Virtualization, SUSE Storage, SUSE Security, and SUSE Observability. The new environment was rolled out in Fundaments' secure data center, fully in line with the municipality's strict requirements regarding data sovereignty.
“Deploying Kubernetes clusters is not complicated in itself,” says Verschuren-Parchomov. “The real challenge lies in managing and securing those clusters at speed and scale, all while complying with strict data protection regulations. That is why the SUSE Rancher Suite is so valuable. SUSE offers the complete ecosystem of solutions we need to meet the requirements for digital sovereignty — for Eindhoven and other Dutch municipalities.”
Within just two weeks, Fundaments delivered a proof-of-concept environment to Eindhoven using the SUSE Rancher Suite. Five months later, the new environment — called Container Platform as a Service (CPaaS) — was successfully put into production.
Sander de Rijk, Cloud Consultant at the Municipality of Eindhoven: “Fundaments delivered a Kubernetes cluster according to the Haven standard in our sovereign cloud environment using the SUSE Rancher Suite. They provided us with stability, reliability, and data sovereignty — all within the agreed timeframe.”
What is the next step for the Municipality of Eindhoven?
By adopting CPaaS, Eindhoven has implemented a secure, microservices-based architecture that significantly accelerates its digital transformation. By partnering with Fundaments and leveraging the SUSE Rancher Suite, the municipality ensures that all data remains securely within the borders of the Netherlands — fully compliant with the Haven standard.
Looking to the future, Eindhoven is exceptionally well-positioned to further modernize its digital services, enabling the municipality to provide its residents with even more efficient and reliable public services.
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