The Schweizerische Bundesbahnen (SBB, Swiss Federal Railways), Switzerland’s national railways company, has deployed Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
Founded in 1902, SBB is the largest travel and transport company in Switzerland and it is also among the biggest employers in the country.
SBB’s operations span four divisions – passenger traffic, freight, infrastructure, and real estate. In 2015, SBB’s network of nearly 10,500 trains carried more than 50 million tons of freight and more than 440 million passengers between 794 stations.
It looked for an IT partner when recognized the potential of digital services and mobility, and customer expectations among its passengers for applications.
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is the first and only container-centric, hybrid cloud solution built from the Docker, Kubernetes, Project Atomic and OpenShift Origin upstream projects and based on the trusted backbone of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
With this Red Hat Platform, SBB has created a scalable and more agile platform for its application development, and is delivering new services, including an updated mobile application, to better serve the millions of passengers who travel via SBB each year.
After selecting Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform in autumn 2015, SBB began a pilot involving 15 projects in January 2016.
Today, 300 users at SBB use Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, with more than 900 containers in service and approximately 400 deployments every day.
The SBB Mobile app has been downloaded more than 7.5 million times since its launch in 2008, and the latest version, launched in 2016, has attracted more than three million regular users.
The app, built on OpenShift Container Platform, enables customers to buy tickets and access a touch timetable, receive real-time information on arrival and departure times, and receive push notifications and reminders from SBB’s travel companion.
For SBB, key benefits of its new solution include its stability and fault tolerance. The new container-based platform has not only given SBB the modern IT platform it sought to create new digital offerings, but it has also resulted in tangible benefits for how SBB’s developers work.