Aussie Broadband goes open source with SUSE

Open-source solution provider SUSE has announced that Aussie Broadband has migrated to a cloud-native private cloud platform using SUSE Rancher Prime, SUSE Virtualisation, and a number of other SUSE technologies, achieving 20-30% improvement in operational efficiency.

Founded in a regional Victorian living room in 2003, Aussie Broadband has grown into a publicly listed company with over 780,000 broadband connections, a team of more than 1300 staff, and was recently named Australia’s Most Trusted Telco by Roy Morgan. Now the fifth-largest retail internet provider in Australia, its rapid expansion, through both organic growth and acquisitions, resulted in a fragmented tech stack.

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.

“As a telco, we’re classified as an essential service, so any downtime within that ISP network is a big deal,” said Ben O’Shea, General Manager Transformation & Cloud at Aussie Broadband. “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.”

With a VMware 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 combination of performance, flexibility and support.

“We did a stringent evaluation,” said O’Shea. “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.”

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.

“Delivering new virtual machines or new container instances can take anywhere from one to two days,” said O’Shea. “With the automation that we've been able to achieve on top of the SUSE platform, we've got that down to one to two hours.”

The infrastructure savings have been just as significant. By retiring VMware and streamlining its data centre footprint, Aussie Broadband has achieved meaningful cost reductions across hardware, power, and software licensing.

“At the end of the day, SUSE has helped us achieve 20–30% efficiency improvement on our day-to-day operations,” said O’Shea.

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.

For the company’s 650,000 residential broadband users, the benefits are already being felt. Applications that support customer connections are now more reliable, resilient and efficient.

“It directly impacts those end customers and translates into a more positive customer experience,” O’Shea said.

Looking ahead, Aussie Broadband is continuing to expand its Kubernetes footprint, with deployments planned across more than 10 facilities in five states. The company is also exploring SUSE Telco Edge solutions to support strategic edge deployments, enhancing critical ISP workloads, and are exploring AI capabilities with the SUSE AI platform to drive further innovation.

“This is exactly the kind of transformation we love to support,” said Ben Henshall, General Manager, Australia & New Zealand at SUSE. “Simple, scalable, and built for growth, Aussie Broadband is showing how open source can power smarter telco operations.”

Image credit: iStock.com/Olemedia