City of Eindhoven accelerates digital services with SUSE and Fundaments
Gemeente Eindhoven (the Municipality of Eindhoven), together with Fundaments, has migrated its key business processes to a microservices architecture. Thanks to a new platform based on SUSE Rancher Suite, delivered as a fully managed service in a sovereign data centre, development processes have become three times faster.
Modernising services through containers
Across the Netherlands, municipalities are striving to deliver more responsive and effective public services within increasingly tight budgets. Like many other public organisations, Gemeente Eindhoven (the Municipality of Eindhoven) views technology as an opportunity to streamline operations and engage residents more actively in local governance.
Previously, Gemeente Eindhoven relied on monolithic applications for a wide range of services — from social care to passport requests. However, these applications were becoming increasingly complex, costly to maintain, and difficult to integrate with systems used by other municipalities or government bodies.
To accelerate the delivery of new digital services, Gemeente Eindhoven decided to adopt a new development approach. Following DevOps principles, the municipality aimed to move to applications based on microservices, running in Docker containers and managed with Kubernetes.
Over the past two years, Gemeente Eindhoven has worked closely with Fundaments for the delivery, management, and maintenance of its infrastructure. From a secure data centre located in Eindhoven, Fundaments provides an Infrastructure as a Service platform for business-critical applications, supported by SLAs.
Building on this successful collaboration, Gemeente Eindhoven asked Fundaments to assist in the transition from monolithic applications running on virtual machines to microservices running in containers.
Gemeente Eindhoven defined several key requirements for Fundaments. One was that the new functionality had to align with the standards and best practices of Common Ground — a collaboration between public and private organisations, including municipalities, IT providers, and technology companies.
Ron Boscu, Manager Marketing & Sales at Fundaments, explains:
“Common Ground aims to help municipalities improve their services, comply with the latest privacy regulations, and strengthen resilience against evolving cyber threats by streamlining information management. To achieve these goals, municipalities need to transform their data processing — from isolated, monolithic systems to integrated microservices.”
To formalise the Common Ground approach, the Association of Dutch Municipalities (VNG) developed Haven: a standard for platform-independent cloud hosting for Dutch municipalities. Haven is part of the Common Ground programme and enables municipalities to develop interoperable and reusable applications based on microservices.
“Gemeente Eindhoven wanted a Kubernetes cluster that complies with the Haven standard,” explains Larik-Jan Verschuren-Parchomov, CTO at Fundaments. “At the same time, ensuring data sovereignty was essential — which ruled out the use of any hyperscaler.”
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Why SUSE Rancher Suite?
After evaluating containerisation platforms from several leading vendors, Fundaments selected the SUSE Rancher Suite. This integrated portfolio for deploying, managing, and securing both enterprise Kubernetes environments and traditional virtual infrastructures includes SUSE Rancher Prime, SUSE Virtualization, SUSE Storage, SUSE Security, and SUSE Observability. The new environment was deployed in Fundaments’ secure data centre, fully compliant with the municipality’s strict data sovereignty requirements.
“Deploying Kubernetes clusters is not the difficult part,” says Verschuren-Parchomov. “The real challenge lies in managing and securing those clusters at speed and scale — all while meeting stringent data protection regulations. That’s why SUSE Rancher Suite is so valuable. SUSE provides the complete ecosystem of solutions we need to meet the requirements for digital sovereignty — for Gemeente Eindhoven and other Dutch municipalities alike.”
Within just two weeks, Fundaments delivered a proof-of-concept environment for Gemeente Eindhoven using SUSE Rancher Suite. Five months later, the new environment — called Container Platform as a Service (CPaaS) — was successfully launched in production.
Sander de Rijk, Cloud Consultant at Gemeente Eindhoven, adds:
“Fundaments delivered a Kubernetes cluster according to the Haven standard within our sovereign cloud environment using SUSE Rancher Suite. They provided stability, reliability, and data sovereignty — all within the agreed timeline.”
What’s next for Gemeente Eindhoven?
With the adoption of CPaaS, Gemeente Eindhoven now operates a secure, microservices-based architecture that significantly accelerates its digital transformation. By partnering with Fundaments and using SUSE Rancher Suite, the municipality ensures that all data remains safely within the Netherlands — fully aligned with the Haven standard.
Looking ahead, Gemeente Eindhoven is well-positioned to continue modernising its digital services, enabling the municipality to deliver even more efficient and reliable public services to its residents.
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