Mandiri Cloud
Journey to Cloud Adoption
Introduction
Financial Industry as one of the early IT adopters, has a wide range of business applications written in different era, using underlying infrastructure which was the bleeding edge technology of each era.
This article is a series of infrastructure technology supporting different business applications for different era, those eras generally divided into:
- 1990 — Now: Big Iron Servers, IBM i Series (AS/400), Tandem — HP NonStop Series
- 1990 — Now: UNIX Servers
- 2000 — Now: Baremetal x86 Windows Servers
- 2010 — Now: Virtualized x86 Windows & Linux
- 2019 — Now: Cloud based IaaS Windows & Linux
- 2019 — Now: Container based Applications
This article will focus on Cloud based IaaS technology, challenges, opportunities and innovation that we would like to share to wider Financial Services industry.
Challenges
Banking Industry just like any other industry, have to keep themselves competitive by introducing innovative financial services at rapid pace. With the rapid cycle of new products being released every year, our Infrastructure got many different challenges, such as:
- Provisioning new environment for new application,
Where each application consists of minimum 4 set of environment: Development, System Integration Test, User Acceptance Test, and Production.
Provision in this context is acquiring Infrastructure resources, such as compute (CPU & RAM), storage (Disk), and network. - Installation & Configuration standard platform software,
New environment will have to be configured with our standard platform software, such as Operating System, Application Servers and Database Servers.
Configuring platform software to each environment is quite challenging, since it will require colossal amount of labor work, which require different skillset to do the work. - Tight Project Timeline
Each application will have its own project timeline, which mostly have a “yesterday is the dead line” timeline, which has increased the pressure of our Infrastructure team to complete the task.
In general, above activities will require 12 weeks to complete for each application. These challenges have pushed Infrastructure team to create an innovation based on available technology on the market, to shorten the cycle of environment provisioning as fast as possible.
Innovation
We have been looking at Cloud Technology for quite a while, with all the benefit that comes with it, such as: Elasticity, Scalability, Availability, and Efficiency.
We understand that out of 3 Cloud technology category, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, we believe we have to start somewhere to embark our Cloud technology adoption.
Based on lengthy internal discussion, we believe IaaS will provide the first stepping stone for our team to Cloud technology, and also at the same time answer our 3 challenges above.
To convince our wider stakeholder about the benefit of IaaS, we are using real estate terminology: Landed House vs Apartment.
Similar analogy can be applied to IaaS, as follows:
Why Private Cloud
Cloud deployment model has 3 categories: public, private and hybrid cloud (combined public and private). We choose to start our cloud journey from private cloud, after considering many different aspects of security and regulatory. We believe as our cloud adoption becoming mature, we plan to offer more flexibility by offering the next cloud deployment model: hybrid cloud.
Cloud Adoption Plan
As part of our Cloud Adoption plan, we lay down our foundation by providing IaaS capability — 2018 planning and 2019 implementation, and we expand to PaaS capability to support new generation application built native for cloud — Cloud Native Application (CNA) by 202x.
Implementation
In Mandiri, our Private Cloud IaaS platform went live in 2019 and we named it as Mandiri Cloud. When we build this platform, reliability and availability has been our top priority. To support highly available platform, Mandiri Cloud will span across multiple data centers, Primary Data Center and Disaster Recovery Data Center. Hence, any application deployed on top of this platform will inherit reliability & availability of Mandiri Cloud platform.
Since 2019 went live, close to 80+ applications went live on top of this platform, utilizing 500+ VMs.
Process Governance
Since Mandiri Cloud is fully automated system, we can provide standardized IaaS template — consists of base Operating Systems (Linux & Windows) and Database Servers, verified by our Security unit and has passed standard security process (hardened, patched). To ensure guaranteed delivery quality, any changes will be recorded in our ticketing system.
In general IaaS request process as follows:
- After choosing the right IaaS platform, Application team will submit IaaS request through Mandiri Cloud portal
- Infrastructure team will review the IaaS request, and approve the request if it has met with our standard request information
- Mandiri Cloud will automagically provision the new IaaS based on submitted request
- At the end of the month, Application team will receive their actual IaaS capacity and workload.
There are 4 service tiers based on criticality: Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze.
And user can choose 4 different ‘t-shirt like’ capacity size, Xtra Large, Large, Medium and Small, to cater wide range of capacity requirements.
Mandiri Cloud in Action
- Our Portal Mandiri Cloud, integrated with enterprise LDAP services to ensure precise mapping between user and role And Cloud IaaS is served as catalog, allowing application team to choose the right services that matched their requirement.
- TK mandiri cloud catalog preview
Benefit after Mandiri Cloud Implementation
With automated deployment using Mandiri Cloud, our Infrastructure team can go home a little bit early now, and gone are the days where our different unit (network, server, storage) must be standby during provisioning & deploying new application environment.
All above benefits come with one of biggest Mandiri Cloud challenge: people’s mindset, skill and culture. With new mindset — Landed House vs Apartment, Infrastructure team will have to promote this new idea to broader audience, there is an option to deliver project in less time, no error prone, reliable and repeatable.
All this innovation to keep our organization competitive and a realization one of our key culture: Bersama Membangun Negeri.
What Next
- We plan to expand Mandiri Cloud to wider Bank Mandiri subsidiaries, so the entire Mandiri Group will enjoy the benefit of this technology, and increase Mandiri Group competitiveness as a whole.
- PaaS automated deployment for Kubernetes workload. As part of our Cloud technology adoption, we started to implement Cloud Native Application (CNA) for new applications. CNA requires new set of software design principles and new set of infrastructure technology.
We will discuss how our Infrastructure team have to provide a new set of technology for CNA based applications, in the next article.
Next Article: Designing Kubernetes based Infrastructure for CNA based Applications.
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