Microservices architecture for reuse and agile orchestration

Red Hat execs in the region hosted Malaysian media during a webinar to talk about their Red Hat Summit announcements this year.

Red Hat country manager, Eric Quah went straight to talking about Red Hat customers who presented during the online summit event. A few of these are Verizon and Ford who are cognisant of the current situation, and the importance of being able to shift business focus, to have more agility and to handle demand they had not foreseen under normal business circumstances.

Noteworthy also is Ford, who despite lockdowns and social distancing kept their factories open to produce much needed ventilators for use by infected coronavirus patients.

For them to be able to do so, meant them changing their production line, their workforce, their systems and so on.

The point is that the foundation Ford had established, gave them the agility to change their business model, change their processes and create a whole new product, Eric said.

Announcements

There were three important announcements during the online summit last April. Eric explained customer requirements for a platform that can quickly deploy innovation. “From idea to prototype to production, it used to be 12 months, but now it takes one week.”

He also pointed out many environments are steeped in traditional legacy virtualisation technology – so how to modernise all this?

OpenShift virtualisation is Red Hat’s answer, which moves virtualised environments onto a container platform which ensures consistency in running their operations, while still have agility and control over legacy apps.

“We see a lot more customer moving to the container platform technology, and we have also announced Red Hat Cluster Management for Kubernetes.”

This can be described as a single product to manage all container platforms they have, whether they are on-premise, on the cloud, or in multi hybrid clouds. “This eases up operations and apps roll out, so things work faster for customers,” Eric explained.

Paperless and quick

Alliance Bank Malaysia’s Head of Lifestyle Banking, Lee Chen Choong, also shared the bank’s experience in deploying a paperless way to onboard banking customers.

Opening a consumer bank account used to take some hours, with customers needing to take at least half the day off to do so.

With the new branch-in-tablet solution, Alliance Bank employees can facilitate opening new accounts in an average time of 20 minutes, complete with debit card, Internet and mobile services activation.

If it was a business account, it would usually take two weeks to open, as multiple documents are required. This has been reduced to a day or two, with the branch-in-tablet solution.

Lee had said they were very clear from the beginning about investing in tech that can be reused. “We needed to be able to refactor all the components built, for different channels.

Red Hat offers a microservices architecture and all the components although built for the branch, could be orchestrated for another channel like the mobile banking app. For example, e-forms created for branch used, could also be used on the mobile banking app.

This resulted in shorter project delivery time, and now there are monthly deployments of new features.

“Our minimum viable product has since moved on to becoming a full programme to migrate (fully) from paper-based processes,” Lee said.