Maersk uses cloud to spur development of containerized solutions built on Kubernetes

Headquartered in Copenhagen, A.P. Moller - Maersk moves things—a lot of things to a lot of places. It’s the biggest container-shipping company in the world. Shipping is a physical activity, but the company decided to make its operations increasingly digital. As Rasmus Hald, Head of Cloud Architecture at A.P. Moller - Maersk, puts it, “The Maersk strategy is to overlay physical container-shipping with digital services that strengthen customer engagement.” He notes that achieving this level of transformation requires thorough analysis of huge amounts of data from cargo ships, ports, and the company’s everyday activities worldwide.

Empowering people to put the cloud to work

Traditionally, Maersk has used its own datacenters and added IT resources to them when it needed to handle large IT projects. To foster ongoing digital transformation however, the company is shifting to a hybrid approach, identifying beneficial projects to run in the cloud. “We see cloud services maturing,” says Hald. “We’re making a strategic switch and having a cloud provider manage many core tasks, such as maintaining and provisioning hardware and software, so our IT engineers can focus on innovation.”

He adds that using open-source software plays a key role in the company’s digital transformation strategy. “We appreciate the concepts of community sharing and community contribution in open source. It speeds the evolution of technology.” He continues, “We make it a practice to choose the technology that avoids overengineering, whether it’s cloud, proprietary, or a particular programming language.”

As far as Hald is concerned, Microsoft fully supports open-source software in the sense that the Microsoft Azure platform works well with whatever development and architecture tools Maersk needs. “Because our tools are fundamentally open-source software technologies, we don’t have to wait on any provider to develop solutions that the software community needs.” Specifically, Maersk handles key workloads using Ansible, Cloudera, Jenkins, Java, Node.js, Eclipse, multiple Linux distributions ranging from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Ubuntu, and high-performance computing, among others.

Implementing a container strategy

As part of its overall cloud migration strategy, Maersk chose Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to handle the automation and management of its containerized applications. (A containerized application is portable runtime software that is packaged with the dependencies and configuration files it needs in order to run, all in one place.) AKS fully supports the dynamic application environment in Maersk without requiring orchestration expertise.

The company uses AKS to help set up, upgrade, and scale resources as needed, without taking its critical applications offline. “We want to focus on using containers as a way to package and run our code in the cloud, not focus on the software required to construct and run the containers,” Hald says. “Using Kubernetes on Azure satisfies our objectives for efficient software development. It aligns well with our digital plans and our choice of open-source solutions for specific programming languages.”

Additionally, Maersk chose Azure over other cloud platforms because Azure offers a wider variety of available services and global scalability that supports the number and type of tasks the company wants to undertake. “The key question we ask is, ‘Where does the cloud stop and where does our work begin?’ For the Connected Vessel program, Azure made the most business sense, and it promotes agility,” says Hald. “Just the fact that we’re asking questions like this illustrates our paradigm shift to support digital transformation.”

Freeing talent to create

These examples illustrate how important it is to Maersk to deploy IT engineers more effectively. “We want engineers to be an active part of our new way of working, which means spending their time and effort where it makes the most business impact,” Hald says. “When topped with open source, Azure gives engineers freedom. Software developers have had enough of servers. They want to create. And we want them to.” Combining advanced technology with this mindset also helps Maersk better attract talented engineers who value innovation and the opportunity to positively affect the business.

For example, with increased time and talent, Maersk engineers were able to address customer requests by adding additional shipment monitoring capabilities to the company’s portfolio of solutions. Namely, they are in the process of building an Internet of Things (IoT) solution that will use AKS along with Azure IoT Hub to more closely monitor shipments and physical shipping containers (not to be confused with software containers governed by AKS), including conditions within the containers. “Running an IoT hub may not differentiate Maersk in the market but having a connected vessel—with a growing multitude of our services to support it—soon will,” says Hald.

This project demonstrates the company’s new agility, such as greatly reducing the time and bureaucracy required to get IT resources in place to start it. “Without Azure, it could be six months before we had the first server ready for developers on our Connected Vessel program,” says Hald. “With it, we completed concepting, development, testing, and deployment in six months.”

Hald summarizes the progress Maersk has made, saying, “Imagine solutions that harvest data that has never been available before—data that informs customers and ships’ crews about the condition of their cargo. Imagine data that powers a model that calculates IoT locations even when physical devices can’t be tracked. That’s the world we’ll soon live in, and Maersk will help make it possible.”

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