ANZ Banking Group is working with Infosys to re-platform its internet banking to run on Red Hat’s OpenShift platform, with the new infrastructure handling roughly 30 percent of production load.
The bank's former tech area lead for internet banking Leigh Gibson revealed the project in a LinkedIn post, saying it is the culmination of about 2.5 years of effort.
Gibson said the bank decided to upgrade the infrastructure underpinning its internet banking to reduce outages and improve service.
"In 2018, we had waves of incidents and the potential troubleshooting complexity was overwhelming," Gibson wrote.
"Our production support squad started using a structured experimentation framework so they could systematically rule out various hypotheses during incident resolution.
"During major incidents, we listed potential hypotheses on a separate whiteboard and systematically worked through supporting or ruling out each one.
"Platform security, accuracy and availability was deemed our highest priority and high value ideas were prioritised accordingly."
Infosys originally implemented ANZ’s internet banking platform in 2005 and has "continuously maintained it since then, through funding peaks and troughs," Gibson said.
Both ANZ and Infosys "started conversations about architectural options" to re-platform internet banking last year, which ultimaterly led to a formal request "for the program to pivot to Openshift Container Platform (OCP)".
“A proof of concept initiative was successful, a contract was signed and since July, we have been running 30 percent of customer traffic over a new OpenShift platform in production," Gibson wrote.
Gibson noted the importance of making the right architectural decision, particularly around its ability to scale.
The bank confirmed in a statement to iTnews that it moved initial services to the OpenShift Container Platform in July to continue improving the platform for its internet banking.
“We made this move after conducting a successful proof of concept initiative earlier this year and felt the new platform would provide greater flexibility, reliability and allow us to make services available to other digital channels,” an ANZ spokesperson told iTnews.
“In recent years we have made significant improvements to our platform reliability for internet banking.
"We expect that to improve again this year and the move to OpenShift has helped us continue that progress."
OpenShift is already used in other parts of the bank, where containerisation is enabling technology teams to increase the speed of software releases and to make production changes inside business hours.
