As consumer expectations rise, so does the pressure on banks to innovate faster. Increasingly, customers assume that financial services institutions will provide real-time access to banking services on-the-go from multiple devices, alongside integration with third-party apps. They also look for assurance that their financial data is highly secure. A large European bank looked to IBM Business Partner RedBridge to help it respond to these demands. With an inflexible, outdated approach to application development, the organization was struggling to keep up with more agile competitors. It targeted a radical transformation—and looked to open source technology expert RedBridge to show it the way.
Daniel Pfeifer, Head of Consulting—Development at RedBridge, takes up the story: “It’s all too easy for organizations to get stuck in a rut when it comes to application development. This large European bank was a typical example. They were building services on top of a landscape that was up to 15 years old in some parts.”
He continues: “The infrastructure team would get updated apps thrown over the wall to them and they would work in isolation to put them into production. Lead times were as much as nine months.”
With the organization facing competitive pressures to innovate faster, it called in RedBridge to help assess the scale of the challenge. The RedBridge consultant quickly identified that a root-and-branch change was required.
“Your developers are responsible for keeping your services fresh and appealing,” comments Pfeifer. “If they’re not happy with their toolset or processes, then you’re stifling their productivity. Together with the bank, we decided it was time to introduce agile DevOps principles with the modern technology to match.”
With help from RedBridge, the bank selected IBM® WebSphere® Liberty, Red Hat OpenShift (link resides outside ibm.com) and MicroProfile to drive its application modernization journey.
Pfeifer recalls: “First, we analyzed the organization’s existing application landscape, investigating how we could transform it from a monolithic into a microservices environment. We decided that containers were the best way to host the microservices and identified Red Hat OpenShift as the ideal Kubernetes platform. Our next task was finding a way to augment the bank’s existing Java EE code to integrate with both Kubernetes and DevOps best practices. The answer was a combination of IBM WebSphere Liberty and MicroProfile.”
Through IBM WebSphere Liberty, the bank gained an up-to-date, standards-based runtime that eliminates Java architecture constraints. RedBridge guided the organization through the modernization of its core banking and in-branch applications, as well as instituting real cultural change at the bank.
“Our first challenge was convincing the institution’s employees that such significant change was warranted,” says Pfeifer. “Once agreed, we took the lead in rolling out Liberty across the organization. We then introduced a proper DevOps mindset, dissolving silos and transferring ownership of the applications to the development teams.”
In a significant project milestone, the bank worked with RedBridge to transform a large monolithic enterprise application into a microservices deployment. RedBridge also introduced A/B deployment at the organization, reducing risk when rolling out new services and features.
“The biggest project we took on was modernizing the bank’s fund management services app,” comments Pfeifer. “We turned that from a huge monolith into as many as 71 individual services, which enables dramatically shorter deployment times and greater flexibility. Through A/B deployment and immutable containers, we gave the organization more confidence that whatever they tested would operate the same in production – no surprises!”
Avoids unnecessary changes to apps when upgrading to new releases of Liberty thanks to Liberty’s zero-migration architecture
The bank is using its new agile DevOps approach to bring new services to market faster, helping it to carve out a competitive edge. Now that the modernization phase is complete, the organization can fully exploit cloud-native development.
“By combining IBM WebSphere Liberty with MicroProfile and Red Hat OpenShift, we were able to slash deployment times,” recalls Pfeifer. “For instance, the bank was able to roll out new features for its fund management services app in minutes rather than months. The organization can now innovate at pace with FinTechs and other competitors, helping it retain and grow its market share. Cloud-native development and delivery is a key differentiator for the bank.”
By taking advantage of built-in features within IBM WebSphere Liberty, the bank is empowering developers with powerful new capabilities while controlling cost and complexity. Pfeifer explains: “The organization’s DevOps pipeline automatically uses the latest release of IBM WebSphere Liberty, ensuring they have the latest features and fixes. Thanks to Liberty’s zero-migration architecture, the applications work unmodified with each new Liberty release. Using another runtime would force the bank into additional migrations, so it’s a huge time-saver and at the same time helps keep the applications secure.”
Liberty’s zero-migration architecture also allows the organization to adopt newer features for different applications at its own pace. For its slower evolving microservices, the bank has remained on Java EE, while adopting the latest Jakarta EE support for faster moving microservices. The same latest, secure releases of IBM WebSphere Liberty run both with ease. Other runtimes would force the organization to migrate all its applications or remain on older, insecure versions.
The bank is now in the process of moving its traditional IBM WebSphere Application Server workloads from a mainframe to a distributed server environment, confident that its IBM WebSphere Liberty and Red Hat OpenShift platform will continue to yield benefits over the long term.
Pfeifer concludes: “At RedBridge, we help companies use open source technology to their full potential. Our work with this large European bank demonstrates that IBM’s solutions in this space can help organizations bring their services into the future.”
Established in 2003, RedBridge helps organizations achieve more cost-efficient and dynamic IT using open source solutions. By enabling its customers to take advantage of the freedom of choice offered by open source technology, RedBridge is playing a part in revolutionizing the IT sector.
Footnotes
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Produced in the United States of America, July 2023.
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