Financial services institutions (FSIs) today face an incredibly challenging dual mandate:
- An existential need to innovate: Banks, credit issuers, payment processors, and investment managers must innovate quickly in a market disrupted by digital-first fintechs, peer-to-peer payments, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL), mobile-first services, and AI/ML-assisted hyper-personalization.
- Meeting stringent compliance and resilience requirements: FSIs must address evolving cybersecurity threats, new fraud attacks, ever-changing compliance and regulatory requirements, and meet high customer expectations.
Portworx is helping one of Europe’s leading global banks build a technology platform to successfully navigate this dual mandate and drive increased growth and revenue for the bank.
The Kubernetes Journey Begins
The bank was a long-time, highly satisfied Pure Storage customer with hundreds of FlashArrays running in their data centers supporting traditional virtualized workloads. They started their container journey with a few development projects running on Pivotal Cloud Foundry, but soon ran into challenges. The complexity and lack of automation made it hard for the bank to scale the number of applications running. Failures, app outages and data loss were not uncommon. But the bank saw the benefits of Kubernetes (K8s) and how it enabled their developers to move faster to develop, test and deploy code in production.
The bank had a primary development stack that resembled many traditional IT environments: monolithic applications, centralized infrastructure, manual processes for deployment and management. They rely on a range of complex technologies managed within centralized data centers. The bank had also engaged several major hyperscalers, in part to accelerate their pace of innovation. But regulations, compliance policies, and other factors drove the bank to look for an on-prem solution where they could more effectively manage compliance and security requirements.
The bank wanted the best of both worlds: the operating model, speed and agility of the cloud providers along with the security and compliance of their on-prem infrastructure. The solution was an internal development platform (IDP) built on Kubernetes, taking advantage of the built-in virtualization and automation of Kubernetes. As more and more development was taking place on the Kubernetes platform, they quickly realized their applications needed more robust persistent data management capabilities. The initial Container Storage Interface (CSI) drivers connected to external storage arrays were not able to keep up with increasing load placed on them by the dynamic nature of cloud-native applications, whilst supporting massive scale (You can learn more about the limitations of CSI drivers here.)
Enter Portworx by Pure Storage
Pure Storage arrays have underpinned large parts of the bank’s datacenter infrastructure for years, so they were excited when they heard about the Portworx solution. Portworx is the leading container data management platform (according to IDC and GigaOm), trusted by enterprises to address complexities and resiliency challenges in the data infrastructure of mission-critical modern applications. Portworx provided the bank a fully integrated solution to automate, protect, and unify container data management. With Portworx integrated into their Kubernetes IDP, developers and data scientists could manage data in a self-service fashion with just a few lines of code. Their applications could run in production at scale with policy-driven and automated volume expansion and creation.
Their IDP dramatically accelerated K8s application development and modernization efforts, going from a few hundred K8s nodes to nearly 10,000 in a matter of months. It allowed their thousands of development and data science teams to operate at the speed of thought and not be bogged down waiting for infrastructure requests. They can perform self-service data management operations directly in their code without needing to learn anything about the underlying storage infrastructure. In fact, they don’t need to think about storage and data management at all. Which is exactly what they want, because it allows them to focus on writing code and building models to transform the business. The Kubernetes IDP is at the heart of some of the bank’s most critical application development areas including customer acquisition and retention, anti-money-laundering (AML), payments and transfers.
The IDP also helps the organization “shift security left” by implementing policy-based security and compliance mechanisms such as encryption and role based access controls.These policies are developed in collaboration with the information security and compliance teams and are embedded into the “golden paths” for storage and data management that are provided to their developers and data scientists.
Kubernetes Becomes the Standard
In financial services organizations, IT teams often approve one or more officially supported platform stacks for development projects. Historically, those stacks have been made up of traditional components such as Java and .Net development environments, SQL databases etc… and this was true for the bank as well. As the bank designated the internal Kubernetes IDP an officially supported stack, they brought it alongside the traditional stacks. In addition to the app dev and data science acceleration described above, they learned the cost of developing and deploying applications on the Kubernetes IDP was lower than their other stacks and this helped them to designate the K8s platform to be the default platform for all new development. Now, if a development team wants to work outside the Kubernetes IDP, they have to request an exception.
Next Steps
If your financial services organization wants to accelerate innovation while improving compliance and resiliency, and you are building Kubernetes applications, here are two steps you can take:
- Learn more about how Portworx unlocks the value of Kubernetes data in Financial Services
- Attend our upcoming Financial Services webinar
