ANZ bank adopts Red Hat to speed up release cycle
In 2017, the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) realised it needed to increase the speed of its software release cycle, following the bank's API platform experiencing significant growth a year prior.
In a bid to enable "continuous integration and delivery processes", ANZ migrated to a solution based on Red Hat technology.
Specifically, ANZ uses Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Gluster Storage, Red Hat Ansible Tower, and Red Hat Satellite.
"We are doing so much work at the moment around how we transform our organisation, not just how we work, but how we use technology, how we use software to provide a better experience for our customers," ANZ group executive of technology Gerard Florian said during Red Hat Forum 2018 in Sydney last week.
"I'm very proud of the team and the work they've done to get our OpenShift environment into production."
The project began in phases in 2017, with migration of more than 25 services into containers within nine months.
Using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, ANZ said it reduced deployment time from hours to minutes, allowed development teams to deploy their own code into production, automated configuration, and enabled zero downtime deployments.
ANZ also engaged Red Hat Consulting to help upskill the team and migrate the solution.
See also: Red Hat: It's in IBM's best interest to keep us as 'Switzerland'
"As a bank, it's kind of exciting to say we've been in production for over a year with our container orchestration running on OpenShift and to be able to be ahead in that area and use open source," added Mike Berry, tech area lead, platform engineering at ANZ.
ANZ also added a Blue-Green deployment capability, which is a technique that reduces downtime and risk by running two identical production environments allowing for upgrades to be made in the parallel with only one live environment at a time, with the bank noting this created a continuous integration service that superseded its old processes.
For the 2018 financial year, ANZ reported AU$6.4 billion in statutory after-tax profit, roughly AU$6 million less than that reported in 2017.
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