Microservice platform for Raiffeisen Bank Croatia

Do the tight schedule of the project and some space for refining the requirements sound familiar to you? In addition to standard project challenges, in this case, overcoming the cultural difference (hey, really, what difference? :)) and building trust and good cooperation with the client by doing most of the work remotely were essential factors. The fact that this was the first project carried out with Raiffeisenbank Hrvatska and a project of strategic importance motivated us even more.

The biggest challenge of the project, apart from purely technical and project-related matters, was the expectation that it would enable greater organizational changes, such as improving the cooperation of Dev and Ops teams, increasing IT flexibility and efficiency, or shortening Time To Market. This would not be possible without understanding the full picture of the situation and the strong support that the project has gained not only among management but also at lower levels of the organization.

From the start our approach focused on shifting the experience that our engineers gained in other projects, including those related to digital transformations. Besides, from the very beginning of the cooperation, we focused on fully open communication and high visibility and transparency of our work so that we could quickly build a partner relationship and receive feedback.

• Flexible and open architecture allowing quick implementation of the business solutions
• Shortening the TTM (Time To Market) for business services deployed on the StarBoost platform
• Cost optimization by using Open Source technology in place of commercial enterprise-class solutions
• Improved cooperation between development teams and a bank’s division thanks to the implementation of DevOps practices
• Stability and security of the solution confirmed by external audits
• Attractive workplace – the Bank, as a technology company, using popular, commonly known technologies and coupling it with a modern approach to software delivery.

The StarBoost platform was our response to the bank’s needs. It was an integration of several Open Source technologies to finally provide a coherent work environment for developers and allow us to deploy microservices written by them.

To save time, OpenShift was selected as the core of the platform, which provided some basic out-of-the-box functionalities related to container scheduling and orchestration. There was no necessity to provide a new code repository as we integrated with GitLab, which was already fully functioning on the Bank. CI / CD processes were based on Jenkins.

We decided to employ the Elasticsearch – Fluentd – Kibana stack to provide centralized logging capabilities. Grafana was used to create dashboards to help monitor the platform itself and the services running on it. Zipkin provided us with tracing capabilities, super-important when it comes to the real-life experience with micro-service architecture. The configuration of platform components is managed by the Ansible playbooks and Terraform lets us automate the processes related to infrastructure management.

After passing the security audit and deploying on the production environment, the platform was transferred to further development and maintenance on the client-side. New building blocks of the platform were introduced as a part of subsequent projects using the StarBoost. This includes such solutions as the framework for implementing front-office and back-office functionalities, Camunda-based processes engine, and the rules engine using Drools, to name a few.

This, in general, puts the Bank on the continuous improvement path in regard to building its capabilities not limited to selected technology or vendor. The sum of all components of the platform gives IT the right set of the tools that are necessary to meet the requirements of the Bank’s business flexibly and agilely.

By implementing the StarBoost platform, the Bank obtained technical possibilities to carry out a digital transformation program. Immediately after the platform was implemented, the first team began to develop business services, thus allowing quick verification and confirmation of assumptions and expectations. The project to implement the new mobile application was the first to consume new technologies and a new way of developing the software.

The implementation of DevOps tools and changes made in the organization of work and teams have contributed to the improvement of cooperation between development teams and the operational team. So not only technologies have changed but, above all, the organization itself.

Within a year of implementing the platform, development teams managed to close over 400 business stories, which translates into more than 20 microservices running in a production environment. On average, the Bank performs more than 10 deployments monthly, which is evidence that the goal of shortening the time to market has been achieved.

At the same time, the Bank is not dependent in any way on the selected technology or vendor, which confirms our fair approach to building a long-term partnership with our customers.