Red Hat OpenShift on Red Hat OpenStack Platform: Flexibility Key to BBVA’s Digital Transformation

More enterprises are actively pursuing technologies that can help them digitally transform and modernize their operations. Virtualization and cloud computing can help jumpstart the process, as can open source platforms like OpenStack, which combines open source tools that use pooled virtual resources to build and manage private and public clouds. We’ve also seen adoption of containerized applications and Kubernetes, an open source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. All together, these technologies can provide the flexibility and scalability modern enterprises can use to compete in an economy that moves at faster speeds.

Red Hat OpenShift, our enterprise-grade, infrastructure-independent application platform built for containers with Kubernetes, is a valuable workload to run on a Red Hat OpenStack Platform private cloud.

Why? OpenShift and OpenStack can deliver applications better together, providing a flexible cloud-native solution that is designed to set the stage for multi-cloud, enterprise Kubernetes. 

Real world usage of OpenShift and OpenStack

We had the opportunity to hear first-hand from a customer at our recent Red Hat Summit 2018 about the company’s success running OpenShift on an Red Hat OpenStack Platform private cloud. BBVA, a global financial group based in Madrid, Spain, is also a recent 2018 Red Hat Innovation Awards winner. BBVA provides financial services to 75 million customers in more than 30 countries and seeks to provide innovative digital services to its customers, such as a mobile app and a new customer website.

That same innovation, however, has placed growing demands on its IT systems, which now handle petabytes of data. The goal: to retire its proprietary infrastructure in favor of an open source platform and update its IT systems to create a global platform that supports existing, business-critical workloads such as new credit card contracts, claims, loans, and mortgages, with the flexibility to add new services as needed. In addition, BBVA wants a platform that aligns with its key digital objectives to reduce average transactional costs by one-third, increase developers’ productivity by a factor of five, and deliver digital solutions three times faster -- all while complying with BBVA’s security policies and the European Central Bank (ECB) guidelines in relation to efficiency, consistency of data, and security policies

To provide needed support for its digital transactions, BBVA has built a single, global cloud platform with the help of Red Hat enterprise open source solutions to support a range of digital services for its customers. The platform is automated, self-service, and data-centric—combining real-time and batch data.

BBVA opted to run OpenShift on OpenStack because it offered more flexibility than traditional virtualization, enabling support for increased availability zones, faster deployment, autoscaling, faster disaster recovery—and allowed BBVA to manage its own resources.

In detailing the bank’s implementation, José María Ruesta, global head of Infrastructure, service, and open systems at BBVA, noted that OpenShift on OpenStack has allowed BBVA to use the same infrastructure and deployment across branches. This has allowed developers to more quickly and easily deploy code across different regions, speeding time to market.

At a high level, and with reliability and resiliency as its chief goals, the BBVA implementation consists of:

• Several Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform clusters in multiple tenants in different datacenters.

• Blue-green cluster support. Blue-green deployment is a technique designed to reduce downtime and risk by running two identical production environments called blue and green.

• Orchestration with the BBVA deployer manager, offering a more simple yet powerful application programming interface (API) to its developers.

• Zero downtime on upgrades for applications and the platform.

The use of open-source, cloud technology using infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) has allowed BBVA to move away from silos and a monolithic architecture to more distributed and high-performance architectures.

This is helping BBVA reduce costs, increase efficiency, and provide better analytics, and deliver a better customer experience. BBVA’s aim is to have four countries with production applications up and running in the next few years.

In our conversations with BBVA, Ruesta summed up why BBVA chose Red Hat: “We want to go on this digital transformation journey with a partner that can help us create the platform that we need—sharing code, information, and ideas.”

Raquel Martín, global head of business process architecture and artificial intelligence technology at BBVA, agreed: “We believe the Red Hat technology will help facilitate innovation at BBVA and allow engineers to accelerate the transformation of processes to be more digital, more automatic, more convenient for customers, and definitely more efficient.”

Learn more about BBVA’s use of OpenShift over Openstack and hear why its new single, global cloud platform is helping the bank digitally transform and modernize for the future.