Migration to Microservices Architecture Archives - IBA Group - USA

Optimizing Business Processes for Logistics

pmamantau — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 13:24:15 +0000

Challenges

The primary objective was to migrate from the proprietary event-based system to a more flexible and maintainable solution, simplify process development, reduce maintenance costs, and improve overall operational efficiency.

Solution Highlights

International transportation is a complex industry that demands seamless and efficient internal processes. The company was previously reliant on a proprietary event-based system that was not only difficult to maintain but also cumbersome for developing new processes. This led to inefficiencies, increased costs, and a lack of agility in adapting to changing business needs.

Results

Improved time-to-market has been achieved, delivering new changes as fast as the business requires them.
Interaction through both old and modern REST APIs, offering a seamless transition with other systems.
Processes are now documented using the BPMN standard, making it easier for both business and IT teams for collaboration.
Quicker adaptation to business needs.

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IBM Cloud Pak Compatibility for a Commercial Bank

Olga — Fri, 05 May 2023 12:15:01 +0000

Challenges

The biggest challenge was using on-premises infrastructure, which brought with it the constant need to support the hardware in the face of increasing data volumes. The bank required new approaches to working with data that the current infrastructure could not support. In light of this, it turned to IBA Group in search of a solution to the several competing challenges it faced.

THE FIRST CHALLENGE
The client was actively developing a mobile application for Internet banking and the introduction of new features, such as online card processing from a website or application and the ability to make online payments. Existing solutions didn’t satisfy the client due to severe user interface issues and the inability to use them on some smartphone models. Moreover, it wasn’t possible to add planned features, such as new types of cost estimates with the existing software.
Since the bank was in a phase of active growth and acquisition of new customers, the user experience was of paramount importance, and the elimination of defects had to occur as quickly as possible. As a result, the delay in the introduction of new features and the inconvenience of the user interface meant a loss of profit and customers.
Key issues were the addition of new features during a period of rapid growth and the difficulty of quickly fixing defects in the user environment.

THE SECOND CHALLENGE
Equipment was purchased and installed in advance to perform the task of scaling the bank’s servers. When optimizing consumption, part of the capacity was idle waiting for loading, requiring maintenance, and taking up space. At the same time, the total cost of maintaining server rooms, cooling, repairs, maintenance personnel, and data backup increased significantly.
The key task with server capacities was to create an efficient system for organizing and storing data, taking into account potential growth for the next 2-5 years.

THE THIRD CHALLENGE
Constant state audits required employees of different departments to generate comprehensive reports for each auditor’s request. Despite the fact that the requests were repeated, the actual data from the databases had to be collected manually. In the last audit, the organization was unable to provide two reports because they didn’t have a sufficient technical base to collect information about transactions, which caused serious problems with passing the audit.
The key challenge in submitting audit reports was the labor intensity and lack of technical ability to collect this information.

OBJECTIVES

Solution highlights

Data Management Solutions to Cloud Migration Service

Having identified the challenges and goals, the IBA architects set about developing a solution. Representatives of the bank focused on fault-tolerant and easily scalable systems that have proven themselves reliable and could be easily maintained by the bank’s IT specialists.

The following solutions were identified:

Migrate the client to cloud infrastructure;
Install OpenShift from RedHat;
Adapt client services to IBM Cloud Pak.

The most suitable analogs of the client’s existing services were selected from the Cloud Pak; new ones were added that best suited the task with growth potential. A separate item was the visualization and reporting system implemented by Cognos Analytics.

Benefits Our Customer Received by Moving Data Management to a Cloud Service:

The customer got the opportunity to use the new functionality immediately upon completion of the development and testing stages.
No problems were noticed in the event of a failure of the main system, with the client receiving a backup system with a previous working version. This acted as an immediate replacement while the problem was fixed.
Adding hardware capacity was no longer the customer’s main concern, as now monitoring systems automatically suggest necessary changes. Scaling is implemented as needed in a few clicks by the bank’s engineers.
Increased customer business growth.
Increased customer satisfaction due to the high speed new functionality and the quality of services provided.

Key Results

The bank was able to abandon 80% of their server space and equipment in favor of a cloud service provider.

No infrastructure failures were recorded within two months after the improvements were made by the IBA Group team, compared to 13 failures previously.

Cloud-native architecture approach based on RedHat, OpenShift, and appropriate cloud alternatives for existing services.

Cloud Pak for data as ETL/ELT. Cognos service for data audit features.

Multi-cluster data aggregation using DataStage. Fault-tolerant data storage in two data centers for the required 99.99% uptime.

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Development of a Unified Information Web System for an International Corporation

Olga — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 10:43:14 +0000

Background

Different business units of the company have many systems that address the same tasks in different ways. It is required to develop a unified solution for the entire enterprise.

Business Challenge

Develop a scalable solution that allows combining various enterprise systems into one.

Project objectives:

Migration from legacy systems to a modern platform.
Development of a unified application.
Reducing the cost of maintaining multiple systems that address the same tasks.

Solution

IPPF (Integrated project planning and forecasting) is a web-based information system that collects contract and project information from various enterprise sources. By consolidating this data, workflows, and reports, the solution allows contract and account management to be integrated into customer management systems.

The IPPF solution provides project managers and partners with a key resource to help manage and monitor financial and non-financial project information through project financial supervision (planning, reconciliation and forecasting), non-financial project evaluations, and integration with back-end systems.

Technically, the IPPF solution runs on a web server cluster of three servers connected to three DB2 servers. Fallback recovery is ensured: in the event of an application failure, it can switch to another app deployed in a different cloud region.

Result

A state-of-the-art and scalable JEE application has been developed, which includes 30 different data sources. The number of IPPF users is constantly growing and amounts to more than 30,000 people worldwide.

The customer benefited from a multiple reduction in costs for maintaining the system due to the closure of similar applications.

Custom Development

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Development of a User Interface for the Core System of the Largest African Bank

Olga — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 10:26:09 +0000

Background

The Customer uses its hand-crafting mainframe-powered system as a banking core system. It conducts transactions and administers accounts. This is an obsolete system that is difficult to add new products to, and changes related to the regulatory requirements cannot be implemented quickly. The bank decided to switch to SAP Banking Services, but not to use SAP UI, because it has its own requirements for validation and integration with other systems.

Business Challenge

Develop a SAP CRM user interface that would allow the bank to create and maintain accounts, generate reports, and introduce new products.

Solution

Data residing in older systems is migrated to SAP CRM. At the same time, client accounts must be maintained continuously, therefore, more strict requirements are imposed on the work of the team in matters of system stability and customer service.

As part of the project, it was possible to switch the management of clients and accounts to more advanced technologies, speed up business processes, reduce the time for creating accounts and improve customer service.

Result

Every day, 30,000 users operate the system, 2,000,000 financial transactions are conducted. Account opening time reduced from 28 to 12 minutes.

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Development of a Solution to Support Digital Channels of the Largest African Bank

Olga — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 14:53:25 +0000

Background

Previously, the bank used the ESB solution, which was insufficient for the development of digital channels: Internet banking, mobile applications, chat bots, etc.

Business Challenge

Develop a new solution that would allow the bank to provide services to its clients 24/7 and scale without loss of quality.

Solution

We chose a solution based on microservice architecture: API Gateway, OpenShift, Docker were used. The project is divided into several domains developed by different teams. These are services for internal and external clients.

The security models that were used earlier were replaced with new ones that meet up-to-date international standards. The solution is deployed in the cloud.

Result

The customer now operates an API that can be called by different systems, while using all the benefits of a microservice architecture. Services are available almost 100% of the time. There are more than 15,000,000 domain service external system calls per week.

Custom Development

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Development of a General-purpose Interface for Corporate Applications of Major Logistics Company

Olga — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 08:34:08 +0000

The largest IT project in Germany in the last 2 years.

Background

The company’s operators use about 5.5 thousand internal applications. They monitor the loading of cargo on ships, provide commercial analysis, and assess financial performance. These applications are isolated and have different interfaces.

Business Challenge

Create a new application development solution with a single interface.

Solution

A team of architects reviewed the current system and business processes. It was decided to use one set of front-end libraries when developing new applications. So they can use the same UI.

The new solution can significantly reduce development costs, because it allows creating a large number of applications, keeping them in the same style and using the same architectural approaches.

Result

About 20% of applications are already using the new UI. The rest should switch to it within 2 years.

Custom Development

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