Raiffeisenbank CZ & ORBIT

Instead of several hours of manual work by different teams, today a new application can be deployed automatically in a matter of minutes. Raiffeisenbank has used the principle of “infrastructure as code”. Thanks to this, the bank can count on simple management of all future applications and high operational efficiency with minimal manual intervention.

“The principle of infrastructure as code and the idea of end-to-end automation (CI/CD, DevOps) shorten and simplify the application deployment process. They guarantee that all our environments are identical, which greatly simplifies subsequent management.”

Tomáš Kavalír, IT Project Manager, Raiffeisenbank

Even before the project was launched, Raiffeisenbank (RB) was already running containerised applications on-premise. However, only parts of the application were automated in the testing-deployment-management process.

Many steps were (semi-)manual and required the cooperation of many teams. This could lead to inconsistencies between the different environments, which subsequently required (manual) remediation.

Moreover, all on-premise infrastructure operations were running 24×7, which is uneconomical. Especially the lower, non-production environments (development and testing) make sense to run only when they are actually needed (e.g. when deploying a new application version).

The joint RB and ORBIT project therefore aimed to find a cloud solution that:

• shorten the deployment time of the new application as much as possible,
• while taking advantage of end-to-end automation,
• be as simple as possible to manage (use PaaS services, etc.).

For this purpose, we chose a pilot application BAAPI (see box), which was still in development and not really deployed in the on-premise infrastructure. We were thus able to establish a modern “cloud approach” to deploying containerized applications to AWS, which will become the basis of a comprehensive framework that Raiffeisenbank will use to deploy applications in the future.

Bank Aggregation API Platform (BAAPI)

An important application (part of a larger package) enabling future bank customers to authenticate using their bank identity. The application was supplied to the bank by an external company and therefore could not be adapted to the current needs of the project.

RB chose ORBIT because of its familiarity with AWS services and its detailed knowledge of the bank’s environment and processes.

Sooner or later, every company that is trying to use the cloud to its full potential will start thinking about automation. Raiffeisenbank decided to lean on the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) concept, which aims to have infrastructure defined in a similar way to application source code.

You can read more about when it makes the most sense to use IaC and which tools to use in this Cloud Encyclopedia article.

The resulting modern solution was eventually achieved through a “partial revolution” (some areas of the solution remained more of an evolutionary shift of the on-prem state), which included the following phases:

• summarizing the requirements and needs of RB
• design of the target cloud architecture of the solution
• preparation of the Infrastructure as Code components
• customization of the BAAPI pilot application image
• preparation of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delviery pipelines
• monitoring and logging of the entire solution

We were delighted to see the amazement on the faces of the administrators when they discovered that the processes they had been dealing with in on-premise for quite a long time and with the risk of error were in the end a matter of a few clicks with a clear result.

Main components of the solution

The key benefits of the resulting solution are therefore simplicity and reliability. Deploying a new version of an application in RB now requires changing a single parameter in the GIT repository. The CD pipeline already takes care of the deployment without a single manual intervention.

If a major change needs to be made to the infrastructure itself, the administrators will edit the Infrastructure as Code template subsection and the change will be deployed again in the same form to all environments in a fully automated manner.

“Thanks to ORBIT and their detailed knowledge of AWS, we were able to better and faster absorb the necessary knowledge and apply it to other projects. For many team members, the application deployment automation project was a learning by doing experience.”

Tomáš Kavalír, IT Project Manager, Raiffeisenbank

We have created a framework according to which Raiffeisenbank can deploy a new application to the cloud fully automatically in the future. Using the Infrastructure as Code concept, our solution is very easy to manage. It saves a lot of time and money and does not require future involvement of ORBIT experts.

General comparison of on-premise and AWS cloud implementation