Kubernetes platform for a new banking application

RCI Banque, the Renault group’s bank for financing and leasing, is introducing a new core banking application. It runs in two flavors: classic on Oracle 19c with JBoss EAP and as a container variant (rootless Podman) on OpenShift, with a scalable API, Kafka and PostgreSQL as well as a change data capture pipeline that connects the system core on Oracle to Kafka. Both flavors need several environments for development, test and production, and both have to be run by a small team for two country organizations.

What we implemented

Since July 2021 we have been building and running the environments: Oracle 19c databases as single instances and with Data Guard, JBoss application servers, the OpenShift clusters including monitoring, Kafka clusters on a Confluent basis with topics and access rights, PostgreSQL as a Patroni cluster on Kubernetes and the Fivetran HVR CDC pipeline that integrates changes from Oracle into Kafka topics. Deployments of the banking applications run via Ansible and AWX from Git, container images via Helm and GitOps with Flux, the registry is Harbor.

On top of that the Linux foundation: patch management and security patching for RHEL 7 to 10, conversion of CentOS VMs to RHEL, in-place upgrades from RHEL 7 to 8, building new RHEL 9 and RHEL 10 systems with Ansible to replace RHEL 7, licensing of virtualized systems via virt-who. For operations we built highly available services such as Nextcloud with MariaDB Galera and GlusterFS, an HA Samba system with CTDB as well as a proof of concept for a new data warehouse on Exasol following the Data Vault model.

Result

The application went live in mid-2023. Since then the rollout to further country organizations of Renault Bank has been under way, and we continue to run the clusters and databases, with checkmk for monitoring and HashiCorp Vault for secrets. The assignment is ongoing.