SUSE has announced that 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 per cent improvements in operational efficiency. 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.
With a VMware (by Broadcom) renewal looming, the team also saw an opportunity to retire more costly proprietary solutions in favour of open source. After evaluating options from Red Hat, VMware and Canonical, Aussie Broadband chose SUSE for its powerful combination of performance, flexibility, and support. 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.
The infrastructure savings have been just as significant. By retiring VMware and streamlining its data center footprint, Aussie Broadband has achieved meaningful cost reductions across hardware, power, and software licensing. 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.
Ben O’Shea, General Manager, Transformation & Cloud, Aussie Broadband
As a telco, we’re classified as an essential service, so any downtime within that ISP network is a big deal. 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. We did a stringent evaluation. We looked at a number of open source and commercial vendors, and the customer references for SUSE and their support were exceptional, and that was a big part of the decision going forward.
