HomePortfolioAutomating a Financial Platform Serving 1.5 Million Banking Accounts

Automating a Financial Platform Serving 1.5 Million Banking Accounts

Finance
CI/CD
Cloud-Native
Kubernetes
VMware

A multinational financial institution turned to Altoros to automate operations, improve security, as well as enable monitoring and alerting.

Automating a Financial Platform Serving 1.5 Million Banking Accounts

About the project

Brief results of the collaboration:

  • With a continuous integration/delivery (CI/CD) pipeline in place, the customer automated platform operations on Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition (TKGI), reducing mutlicluster spin-up time from days to 15 minutes.
  • Thanks to the implemented Tanzu Service Mesh and Tanzu Mission Control, the institution improved security and management of the platform serving 1.5 million banking accounts and $7.54 trillion in assets.
  • By enabling monitoring and alerting, the company significantly cut incident response times.
  • With newfound expertise and a clear roadmap of improvements, the customer’s in-house team can now fully optimize the platform and scale to the needs of 360+ branches.

The customer

The customer is a multinational financial corporation with 360+ branches in the US and UK. For 50 years, the company offers a slew of services from wealth management advisory to commercial banking. In 2021, J.D. Power recognized the institution as #1 in Customer Satisfaction with Direct Retail Banking.

The need

The customer ran a TKGI-based platform to manage 1.5 million banking accounts and $7.54 trillion in assets. Going through a merger with another financial organization, the corporation wanted to streamline and automate cluster deployment to save valuable man-hours. The merger also prompted the company to improve the platform's security and observability in preparation for new processes and workflows. As the in-house team lacked certain expertise around TKGI, this could put crucial improvements on hold.

To get back on track, the customer turned to VMware for assistance. The vendor recommended Altoros, its trusted partner and a certified VMware Tanzu solutions provider, to fine-tune the platform, deliver consultancy, and ensure ongoing support.

The challenges

Under the project, the team at Altoros had to address the following issues:

  • The in-house team performed the majority of platform operations manually, which led to cluster deployments taking days. Furthermore, such a process was highly prone to human error and left the platform vulnerable to security breaches.
  • Due to the absence of properly established monitoring and alerting, the in-house engineers were unaware of arising issues around the deployment and were unable to timely respond to them.

The solution

Stage 1. Engineers at Altoros evaluated the existing architecture, prioritized a backlog of tasks, and outlined a roadmap for improvements.

Through pair programming, the developers transferred knowledge to the in-house team, plunging into Kubernetes best practices: applying namespaces to divide resources between application teams, configuring requests and limits to manage CPU and memory usage, creating disaster recovery plans to minimize downtime, etc.

Stage 2. By implementing Tanzu Mission Control, DevOps experts at Altoros facilitated platform operations, such as management of multiple clusters, users, pods, etc.

To improve platform security, the engineers configured ingress gateways and created network policies in Tanzu Service Mesh to prevent unauthorized access.

Stage 3. By building a continuous integration and delivery pipeline with Concourse, the team at Altoros automated the creation of multiple clusters, as well as the configuration of role-based access control, certificate managers, Kubernetes profiles, etc. In this manner, cluster deployment times were reduced from days to around 15 minutes.

Additionally, the engineers automated namespace provisioning, enabling application teams to jump straight into development.

Stage 4. To improve observability, developers at Altoros configured existing Prometheus and Grafana deployments to monitor relevant logs and metrics, as well as send actionable alerts. This enabled the in-house team to timely address incidents within the platform.

Stage 5. Finally, the engineers delivered recommendations on how to further automate clusters, pods, and virtual machines updates, as well as create and restore backups.

The outcome

Partnering with Altoros, the customer was able to automate platform operations, reducing the time it takes to spin up multiple clusters from days to 15 minutes. With Tanzu Service Mesh and Tanzu Mission Control, the institution improved security and management of the platform serving 1.5 million banking accounts and $7.54 trillion in assets. By configuring monitoring and alerting, the organization effectively reduced incident response times. With additional recommendations from Altoros, the company now has a clear roadmap for further improvements around automation of clusters, pods, and virtual machine updates, as well as enablement of disaster recovery.

Technology stack

Platform

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition

Frameworks and tools

Tanzu Mission Control, Tanzu Service Mesh, Concourse, Istio, Prometheus, Grafana, Bash

Database

Redis

$7.54T

assets
in control

1.5M

banking
accounts

15 mins

to deploy
clusters

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Ryan Meharg

Ryan Meharg

Technical Director

ryan.m@altoros.com650 265-2266

4900 Hopyard Rd. Suite 100 Pleasanton, CA 94588