Portainer speeds up container adoption for this French bank
French Bank
Business Overview
Business Focus
Banking and Financial ServicesBased in France
With more than 4 million customers and growing.Business Case
Containerized applications were being managed manually. The lack of standardized environments and manual container deployments exposed the bank to potential security risks.Container Platforms
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Business overview
This leading bank in France is known for its online banking services and innovative approach to financial services. With thousands of banking features available to over four million customers, they are committed to a seamless user-friendly experience for their customers.
It’s digital platform offers a wide range of services, including, savings accounts, investment products, loans, and insurance. The bank also provides access to a wealth of educational resources, including market analysis, financial news, and investment tools, empowering its customers to make informed decisions about their finances.
The bank differentiates itself by providing competitive pricing and low fees for its services, which has attracted a significant customer base. The bank also stands out for its emphasis on technological innovation and digital tools, enabling customers to manage their finances conveniently and efficiently.
"Our business case is prioritizing engineering resources for innovation by reducing the administrative and security burdens of our old deployment process." Chief Architect
Critical elements of success
In the banking industry, security, innovation, and operational efficiency are critical elements of success.Protecting sensitive customer data, ensuring regulatory compliance, and preventing security breaches were paramount concerns.
Focus on building new infrastructure and critical financial services applications for four million customers.
With over 1500+ environments, simplifying administrative aspects of development like deployment and monitoring, so the organization can deliver more.
The challenge
To continue innovating, this bank recognized several opportunities in it’s application development process. Containerized applications were being managed manually.
Each application’s deployment required complex scripts and manual configurations that led to inconsistencies between development, testing and production environments. The lack of standardized environments and manual nature of container deployment exposed the bank to potential security risks.
Integrating new software took up to 5 days. With multiple services running, debugging and monitoring logs became a daunting task. Ensuring consistent security practices across various services and environments left the team concerned about data breaches and compliance.
They needed a solution to deploy critical financial services across 1500+ environments and began looking for a solution. The IT staff, who had been familiar with Portainer from personal use saw how they could deploy containers in an industrial way, with a balance of security, simplicity and deployment efficiency.
Portainer Business Edition had everything the bank needed, so it was just a matter of budget. At first glance, the banking team almost missed a critical assumption in their consideration to build or buy.
At their scale, the pay-as-you-go rate was not a convincing proposition. They soon discovered the Business Edition unlimited license which made the decision to buy relatively straight-forward. Choosing
Portainer meant all of the security and operational benefits of container management would be available immediately.
Something had to be done to maintain agility and security while supporting growth.
Quotes from the Team
The results
In terms of security and compliance, Portainer accelerated container adoption. Containerization provided isolation and encapsulation, reducing the risk of security breaches. Portainer’s role-based access controls (RBAC) were used to establish helpdesk access and permissions to the necessary resources while limiting vulnerabilities and safeguarding customer data.
Containers improved DevOps practices by enabling collaboration between development and operations teams. With only 10 people on the platform infrastructure team, consistent environments throughout the software development lifecycle facilitated faster software releases, promoting agility and efficiency.
The strategy was to deploy all infrastructure applications as containers with Docker, and all business application containers on Kubernetes. For Kubernetes, the bank reviewed Portainer GitOps for GitOps deployment. App distribution was simplified to 1 server and 1 app. Using Edge Agent and Edge Stacks to deploy apps, integrating new software was reduced from 5 days to 3 hours.
“Before Portainer, integrating new software took 5 days, with containerization + Portainer, 3 hours.” Chief Architect
CI/CD integration with Portainer streamlined the deployment process, making it easier to push updates to production while maintaining consistency across environments. This led to faster rollouts and improved time to market. With Portainer managing their containers, the financial team now has more time to focus on innovation and development, fostering the longstanding culture of creativity and continuous improvement.
“When we tell people in the banking community we are using Portainer, there is general shock as they don’t think Portainer can do CD. When we show them, there is disbelief.” Chief Architect
Productivity gains and time to market are huge. They want to quickly roll out new financial products and it took months to get their 10-person development team productive with Docker and Kubernetes. The learning curve was steep, but the ability to see real-time insights into application performance, resource utilization, and container behavior in Portainer makes everything much more efficient.
