CASE STUDY:

Driving Banking Innovation with Cloud Native

ING has long embraced innovation in banking, launching the internet-based ING Direct in 1997.

In that same spirit, the company underwent an agile transformation a few years ago. "Our DevOps teams got empowered to be autonomous," says Infrastructure Architect Thijs Ebbers. "It has benefits; you get all kinds of ideas. But a lot of teams are going to devise the same wheel. Teams started tinkering with Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos. Well, it’s not really useful for a company to have one hundred wheels, instead of one good wheel."

Looking to standardize the deployment process within the company’s strict security guidelines, the team looked at several solutions and found that in the past year, "Kubernetes won the container management framework wars," says Ebbers. "We decided to standardize ING on a Kubernetes framework." Everything is run on premise due to banking regulations, he adds, but "we will be building an internal public cloud. We are trying to get on par with what public clouds are doing. That’s one of the reasons we got Kubernetes."

They also embraced Docker to address a major pain point in ING’s CI/CD pipeline. Before containerization, "Every development team had to order a VM, and it was quite a heavy delivery model for them," says Infrastructure Architect Onno Van der Voort. "Another use case for containerization is when the application travels through the pipeline, they fire up Docker containers to do test work against the applications and after they’ve done the work, the containers get killed again."

Because of industry regulations, applications are only allowed to go through the pipeline, where compliance is enforced, rather than be deployed directly into a container. "We have to run the complete platform of services we need, many routing from different places," says Van der Voort. "We need this Kubernetes framework for deploying the containers, with all those components, monitoring, logging. It’s complex." For that reason, ING has chosen to start on the OpenShift Origin Kubernetes distribution.

Already, "cloud native technologies are helping our speed, from getting an application to test to acceptance to production," says Van der Voort. "If you walk around ING now, you see all these DevOps teams, doing stand-ups, demoing. They try to get new functionality out there really fast. We held a hackathon for one of our existing components and basically converted it to cloud native within 2.5 days, though of course the tail takes more time before code is fully production ready."

The pipeline, which has been built on Mesos Marathon, will be migrated onto Kubernetes. Some legacy applications are also being rewritten as cloud native in order to run on the framework. At least two smaller greenfield projects built on Kubernetes will go into production this year. By the end of 2018, the company plans to have converted a number of APIs used in the banking customer experience to cloud native APIs and host these on the Kubernetes-based platform.

Even with the particular requirements that come in banking, ING has managed to take a lead in technology and innovation. "Every time we have constraints, we look for maybe a better way that we can use this technology," says Fernandez-Barandiaran.

The results, after all, are worth the effort. "The big cloud native promise to our business is the ability to go from idea to production within 48 hours," says Ebbers. "That would require all these projects to be mature. We are some years away from this, but that’s quite feasible to us."