Introduction:

The fluorescent lights flickered to life in the server room as Jon pressed the power button. With a low hum, the rows of black chassis in the open rack frames began to boot up one by one.

As vice president of IT operations for a fast-growing tech startup, it was Jon’s responsibility to ensure their network infrastructure could scale alongside the business.

For the past year, he had relied heavily on MikroTik’s Cloud Hosted Router (CHR) technology to virtualize the core networking functions. Running RouterOS in hypervisors offered flexibility to rapidly adjust resources as their user base and online features expanded.

However, as traffic loads continued rising each quarter, Jon was finding the limitations of CHR.

The Challenge:

“We were hitting buffer bloat during our peak afternoon hours,” Jon explained, shaking his head irritably. Throughput tests pinpointed the WAN links maxing out as the culprit. As I interviewed Jon in his cluttered office, other IT staffers could be heard discussing the issue down the hall.

According to Mikko, a network engineer who had been monitoring switchloads, “Even redistributing traffic didn’t fully resolve it. The CHR CPUs were maxed trying to keep pace.” Directly quoting from MikroTik’s licensing docs, Jon lamented, “Each concurrent virtual CPU core costs more money. We can’t afford to quadruple down again at these rates.”

Wiping sweat from his brow, Jon was clearly frustrated. “Don’t get me wrong, the flexibility of CHRs allowed us to come this far. But the restrictions will squeeze our budget dry before we can give students the experience they deserve.”

It was evident the team needed to find another way before performance slipped further.

Searching for Answers:

After putting in extra hours poring over the Mikrotik documentation, Jon called a meeting with his team. “When troubleshooting online, I came across some forum posts discussing containerization using Mikrotik,” he began. He went on to describe his findings that RouterOS could run within Linux containers independently of CHR licenses.

The engineers responded enthusiastically to the prospects. “If we can allocate dedicated resources to each Mikrotik VPS container, that would resolve the scaling issue,” Mikko chimed in. Jon agreed containers could be the way forward if successfully implemented.

Testing the Waters:

Wasting no time, Jon got to work deploying the first testing environment. “Getting RouterOS installed in a Mikrotik container was straightforward from their wiki guide,” he noted. After some configuration, Jon proudly showed Mikko the throughput had doubled over CHRs.

“Results like that could give us headroom for months,” beamed Mikko. Encouraged, Jon authorized expanding the implementation while closely monitoring Mikrotik’s performance.

Expanding the Experiment:

Within weeks, they had deployed a dozen RouterOS containers using KVM virtualization.

Careful Mikrotik metrics recording affirmed containers were linear to scale. Where CHRs hit restrictions, the VPS containers sailed past previous limits. “It’s like night and day,” Jon declared enthusiastically.

Lessons Learned:

The accounting department also took an interest. “Based on three months of container billing versus projected CHR and VPS costs, we’re saving thousands annually,” one analyst reported.

Some tweaks were needed to the container setup but overall the new model surpassed expectations. They looked toward helping others adopt the technology.

Moving Forward:

With containerization, the network transformations made possible by the RouterOS technology had finally fulfilled their potential. Firewalls, routing, and traffic management that were once restricted could now scale unbounded.

“Any organization using RouterOS virtualization should seriously consider this approach. The scalable performance of independent container-based Router instances has been a revelation,” Jon enthusiastically shared.

Looking to the future, the leadership team planned further core and edge optimizations. “Students deserve networks that power robust, uninterrupted online experiences. Thanks to Jon’s efforts replacing restrictive licensing with flexible containerization, we’re now equipped to deliver on that for many years to come,” expressed the CEO.

With the limitations of CHR licenses now an afterthought, this educational technology startup’s network infrastructure was fit to Router on through future growth. Their containerized Router deployments had proven it possible to scale securely and support new frontiers of digital learning.