Successful Infrastructure Transformation Of Electronic Payments Company Minimize Time-To-Market And Achieve Multi-Cloud Workload Portability

Industry: Financial Services

• 50% cost savings as compared to legacy VMware and Red Hat platforms.

• Managed Kubernetes service frees Internal developers to concentrate on the application layer.

• Cloud workload portability enabled with container orchestration. 

Client Overview:

The customer is one of the largest electronic payment organizations in the United States, and its old VMware and Red Hat OpenShift infrastructure had become unsatisfactory.

In this scenario, running transaction-heavy apps and services was prohibitively expensive, and the company was beginning to develop vendor lock-in. The organization was looking for expertise that could help install a pure upstream cloud-native stack in order to reduce costs, increase flexibility, and improve developer agility.

Running Transaction-Heavy Applications Of Multinational Provider On Legacy Systems Were Proving To Be Prohibitively Expensive 

This multinational provider of real-time electronic payments software and services for banks and financial intermediaries was facing trouble maintaining their services because these applications are so transaction-heavy, that running them on standard infrastructure was becoming prohibitively expensive. 

The company was using Red Hat Openshift in a VMware-based environment. This was not only costly, but it also lacked flexibility, resulting in a growing level of vendor lock-in. To break free from its antiquated infrastructure, the company embarked on a massive digital transformation initiative that included the deployment of both a cloud-native platform for container workloads and a private cloud for virtual machine-based apps.

The company set three main goals for the project at the outset: 

• Reduce costs through a hybrid cloud strategy and infrastructure modernization

• Unlock cloud portability to enable seamless application migration from public to private clouds

• Improve time to application delivery by improving developer agility

In order to achieve these objectives, the company opted to switch to a pure upstream cloud-native stack. The project's primary constraint was keeping up with the current hardware infrastructure, which was transaction heavy but operating admirably.

The Client Found Confidence in Charmed OpenStack and Kubernetes To be The best Fit For Its Cloud Infrastructure Needs

After doing thorough market research the company found that Charmed OpenStack and Kubernetes were the greatest fit for its needs. The platform provided the most attractive economics as well as the flexibility of vendor-neutral, and pure upstream solutions.

Following a successful pilot phase for the underlying infrastructure, AiRo collaborated with the financial services firm to create a Charmed OpenStack private cloud that offered less expensive virtual machines with interoperability and lifecycle automation. The Kubernetes cluster, which was installed on KVM-based virtual machines, was the next stage. The internal team simply had to learn the same lifecycle automation framework to manage both the virtual machine and container layers because the OpenStack cloud and Kubernetes cluster share it.

AiRo Assisted In The Creation Of A Customized Architecture Deployment Strategy To Adhere To The Company's Reference Architecture And Solution Requirements

A highly available production configuration was included in the design, along with a variety of networking, storage, load balancing, logging, and monitoring capabilities. In addition, the company chose AiRo's managed infrastructure service, which allows the in-house IT staff to focus on providing value through the application layer rather than infrastructure maintenance.

The large-scale transformation project is nearing completion now, with a full production changeover scheduled for early this year. The benefits of the new infrastructure are already visible, despite the fact that the installation is still ongoing. To begin with, costs are being drastically lowered. The new stack is so cheap that even with a managed Kubernetes service, the deployment costs half as much as Red Hat OpenShift.

The transition to Kubernetes has improved the company's agility by allowing engineers to iterate faster and deliver software changes more swiftly. Meanwhile, because Charmed Kubernetes is based on Ubuntu, the most common host operating system for container workloads, the organization may easily move between public and private clouds.

In summary, the company transitioned from a vendor-locked, traditional solution to an open, cloud-native stack while preserving its existing hardware reference architecture and outsourcing platform management. Despite all of these enhancements, the company was still able to reduce costs by 50%.

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The AiRo Perspective

The company chose AiRo's managed infrastructure service, which allows the in-house IT staff to focus on providing value through the application layer rather than infrastructure maintenance.