Delivered a stable foundation for core banking
With Red Hat OpenShift and containerization, RBBH’s internal and external customers now experience more stable services. “With Red Hat OpenShift, we can provide our customers the continuous services they expect,” said Koluder. “We’re meeting internal controls and audit requirements for service continuity and more.”
Adopting a development approach based on containers and microservices and dividing complex monolithic systems into smaller pieces has contributed to safeguarding service continuity. “Red Hat OpenShift has taught us to change our approach to building systems; we now divide the complexity of our monolithic traditional core banking system into smaller business domains,” said Koluder. “Decoupling services and creating them for specific business domains means we can deliver high-quality services.” Moreover, RBBH can now change services for one business domain while safeguarding service continuity for other domains.
Cut time to market from months to weeks
RBBH no longer needs to wait months to launch a new functionality. With Red Hat OpenShift and Application Foundations, it can now be released if required every week. “Being able to react quickly to new customer needs is very important in the digital era,” said Koluder. “With Red Hat OpenShift and Application Foundations, we can release new functionality as often as once a week.” Previously, it would have taken the bank a year to build new functionality and integrate it into its previous core banking system.
At a technical level, Red Hat OpenShift allows RBBH to reuse code and quickly adopt third-party applications. It doesn’t matter whether an internal or third-party component is built in .Net Core, Java, or any other technology stack; the bank can containerize those building blocks and run them on the Red Hat container platform. “Red Hat OpenShift allows us to containerize and reuse components that have already been built,” said Koluder. “And that allows us to launch new features and services much faster.”
Moreover, the native self-service functionality within Red Hat OpenShift allows developers to build, deploy, and run their container environments. This feature helps reduce time to market because developers no longer depend on systems, storage, and network administrators, freeing these teams up to focus on other tasks.
Reduced time spent managing systems significantly
The time the operations team spends managing the Red Hat OpenShift environment is now significantly less than the time it typically spends managing parts of the bank’s traditional systems. Teams can spend time innovating because they spend less time maintaining application servers. “Red Hat OpenShift optimizes our containers automatically,” said Koluder. “Our operations team only needs to define some parameters, and it will improve response times, strengthen security—whatever we need.”
Automation has been particularly important for applications where transactions are growing rapidly. RBBH has defined policies in Red Hat OpenShift based on the volume of transactions. Red Hat OpenShift now scales automatically, so customers don’t experience any drop in service during business hours.
Established multiple CI/CD pipelines, gained valuable knowledge, and adopted a DevOps approach
“We are standardizing our continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and Red Hat supports all the tools we need, including our Azure development tools and GitHub. It also provides a container repository,” said Koluder.
The bank currently uses 2 different CI/CD approaches: one for the development of traditional infrastructure and the other for modern application development. With the combination of Red Hat OpenShift and Application Foundations, the operations team was able to build both pipelines with ease. The technologies in Application Foundations have been engineered to help build, deploy, and operate applications with security and scalability in mind.
