Building a 24/7 online infrastructure for Digital Banking Applications
The Objective
Client:
Pension Savings Bank in Jakarta, Indonesia
As a part of the digital transformation journey A Bank in Indonesia wanted to launch a Digital Banking Product that would give their customers a 24/7 banking solution.
They required a platform that could seamlessly take the load of several thousands of customers who were going to register across different parts of two major cities in Indonesia.
The objective was to provide an AlwayOn PaaS that was highly stable with robust monitoring and alerting system and easy to scale out on demand as the utilisation increases.
The Challenges
Timeline:
July 2017 - Jan 2018
The biggest challenge was to onboard the team to the concept of PaaS, to be live 24/7.
The containerization platform was setup manually which overtime had changes in the system configuration that were not version controlled. So making any change would lead to risking the active development cycles and in turn impacting production release.
To top it up the tools being used did not provide enough guidelines to build a Live Platform as a Service.
There were other challenges like :
No central monitoring and alerting for platform, tools or services
Application persistent storage did not have high availability of data and was highly unstable.
Lack of proper H/A, DR and Backups strategy.
The Initiatives
Techstack:
Ansible, Jenkins, Openshift, GlusterfS
The first step was to stabilize the underlying compute layer where the application was running. We re-designed the entire deployment model for the containerization platform and built a solution that would spin up a containerization cluster stretched across two Datacenters within 20 minutes.
This included
Automated deployment mechanism for containerization cluster by use of configuration management tools within a CI pipeline
Configuration management to scale out seamlessly on demand, based on the continuous
A deployment model that includes strategies of blue-green, rolling and canary deployment for platform upgrades.
We enabled High Availability for persistent storage using network file storage with geo-replication across data centers.
Robust monitoring and alerting reports generated for infrastructure utilization and services health check.
Ensuring prod readiness by conducting heavy stress testing on the platform for a week prior to application onboarding. Once the results were confirmed it was released to production in a day.
​​
Once the Compute layer was set up we took on to the other layers which were supporting the continuous integration from dev to prod in order to achieve a highly stable and scalable Toolchain that would form the backend of the Continuous Delivery platform that was being built. In order to achieve this goal we:
Analysed multiple POCs and identified the right failover solution for all the backend tools being used for build and deployment.
Created the guidelines and design to achieve H/A, DR, and backups at all levels
Perform various DR Drills to ensure that the process works just fine.
The Outcomes
Result
Always On PaaS for Banking & Financials
Rebuild a stretch cluster on demand across two Datacentres in 20 minutes.
Always On Platform as a Service for Digital banking Products
Zero downtime for Application and Service layer
Scale out On demand
Geo replication of Data across DC and DR.
RTO and RPO of 1 hr for all backend tools.