Cantarus Grew Into an Enterprise-Grade Provider With Kemp Load Balancing

Cantarus is a UK-based digital agency founded in 2003, focused on creating exceptional user experiences that drive tangible business results. Drawing on decades of combined experience from multiple fields, they work across the entire digital ecosystem to transform client ambition into success, winning them the highest customer satisfaction rating in the industry with a Net Promoter Score of +83.

The Challenge

Cantarus deliver a wide range of customer solutions from website and app hosting to infrastructure as a service or cross-platform integration; hence, uninterrupted user experience is key to customer satisfaction.

“In the past, maintenance or software updates caused outages to our services,” says Chris Gray, Head of Infrastructure Services at Cantarus. “Such routine issues should not impede service delivery, which is why we started to look for ways of ensuring high availability of our services.”

Kemp Solution

Cantarus required a flexible application delivery controller to ensure high availability of their digital solutions. “The load balancer had to guarantee our web farm availability, while remaining flexible and scalable enough to accommodate the diversity and expansion of our offerings. Kemp not only met our requirements but also opened up a whole new area of what we can offer,” says Gray.

The deployment consists of virtual Kemp LoadMasters across two datacenters in High Availability configuration. They reside in front of the web farm from where they direct traffic to available web and database servers for maximum efficiency and are licensed under Kemp’s SPLA Program for managed service providers.

Kemp’s SPLA licensing model enables service providers to provide dedicated load balancing services to all sizes and types of customers, allowing them the flexibility to move up and down billing tiers according to their needs while guaranteeing them a monthly profit margin with no upfront costs.

Thanks to this, Cantarus could expand their portfolio with Kemp’s always-on branch of load balancing, which has since become a sought-after part of their managed service packages.

As part of the highly available service delivery control, Cantarus also offer Kemp’s Web Application Firewall (WAF) as an additional layer of security for the customer’s solution. It sits alongside other security systems to ensure there are multiple protective layers in place, and since the WAF’s rules are automatically downloaded and updated, maintenance and implementation costs are kept to a minimum.

The End Result

The always-on service availability that Cantarus gets with Kemp’s scalable load balancers saw rapid adoption by their clients and has become an integral component of the Cantarus guarantee of outstanding customer satisfaction.

“In our high-availability hosting packages the Kemp appliances allow us to quickly control the flow of traffic within the client’s environment,” says Gray, “We often use this when removing a server from the web-farm for maintenance.” In larger-scale deployment that may require all servers to be removed from a farm, the Kemp load balancers redirect traffic to a maintenance page for a better user experience. In addition, Kemp appliances reduce configuration complexity by providing a single point for, e.g., redirects and SSL offloading, allowing them to be configured centrally without the need to add configuration to all web servers within a farm.

As a next step, Cantarus are investigating the Kemp Kubernetes ingress controller, as they are starting to use Kubernetes for many of their new product as a critical part of their hosting infrastructure. In addition, they are considering adding the Kemp Flowmon product line to provide the customer benefits of bandwidth monitoring, troubleshooting, or ransomware protection.