About the Client
The client is one of the big four private sector banks in India. The bank provides a wide range of banking products and financial services to corporate and retail customers through a variety of delivery channels and through its specialized subsidiaries in the areas of investment banking, life and non-life insurance, venture capital, and asset management.
The client has a network of 5000+ branches and 15101 ATMs across India and has a presence in 17 countries globally.
The Business Challenge
The client was running an IIS ASP .Net Monolith web application hosted on-premise Windows 2012 Server which was installed at multiple Kiosk locations throughout the country.
The decision to move from a legacy platform like Windows 2012 was a critical one, moreover, the complex architecture had scalability and maintenance issues which were not only time consuming but were also an expensive affair to sustain. In addition, the Kiosk IIS Web App is configured with domain-based integrated authentication at IIS level. The governing authority for banks in India has laid stricter laws when it comes to the security of banking applications/frameworks.
The client wanted availability and scalability support in the application and also wanted to abide by the framework set by the regulating authority.
Before approaching CloudHedge, the client had already spent 2 months on a similar manual effort.
How CloudHedge Helped?
CloudHedge suggested automated application containerization of the Windows 2012 server app to Kubernetes based containerized environment having excellent support for scalability with cost-effectiveness from day one.
Automated App Discovery – Take the first step right!
The first step in the process was to setup, deploy and configure the CloudHedge appliance (all prerequisites like Docker, images, etc. pre-bundled) on-premise in an air-gap environment which had strict regulations from the governing authority.
Automated Containerization at its Finest
The next step was to perform infrastructure discovery and assessment of the application hosted under IIS through CloudHedge’s patented and automated tool – Discover. This tool identified the configuration and dependencies resting in the applications within minutes. The recommendation report generated by Discover gave actionable insights on the upcoming app containerization process, therefore, making it predictable.
Once the app processes were discovered, the next step was to use the Transform tool to containerize the source application into an optimized .Net Windows 2019 container – the accelerated approach.
In addition, containerization of the application involved adding support for gMSA (Group Managed Service Account) to the underlying Docker hosts which were running the application containers. As a workaround, CloudHedge created a gMSA in the client’s domain and generated the Key Distribution Service (KDS) root key and added the Docker host to the gMSA account.
One-Click Deployment
Fully containerized within days, the application was deployed on a Kubernetes cluster using CloudHedge’s Cruize tool. The last step in the automated containerization journey was met well within the timelines set by the client!
Benefits
- The solution was deployed through automation, eliminating the need for highly skilled administrators and supervision.
- Zero downtime and maintenance costs for platform upgrades and patching due to managed Kubernetes services.
- CloudHedge discovered, containerized and deployed the entire application within a week’s time instead of months. The project delivery timeline was almost reduced by 80%.
- Ability to distribute different services on containers instead of increasing the number of VMs thereby reducing the infrastructure costs by 45%.
- Containers spin up new environments in minutes vs days in the earlier process.
