Driving Kubernetes Adoption in Finance with Rancher

“Our portfolio is geared toward creating long-term digital business models in the financial industry. Inventx is the enabler for continuous business transformation. Rancher brings the flexibility and openness that helps us achieve true transformation in the most agile and efficient way.” Domenic Mayer, Senior Cloud Engineer and Solution Architect, Inventx

Supporting Microservices and Cloud Native

In Switzerland, Inventx is the IT partner of choice for financial and insurance service providers. Its full-stack DevOps platform, ix.AgileFactory, allows financial organizations to move to a modern, cloud-native and microservices-centric infrastructure. The platform decouples core applications from the central infrastructure, allowing organizations to better manage and innovate applications in safety.

Like most companies in the financial space, Inventx has a secure, on-premise architecture that, until four years ago, comprised a mix of VM-based IBM architecture and Linux (Red Hat) servers. Due to obvious customer sensitivities, security and compliance have always been major priorities.

Adopting Containers, Kubernetes and Rancher

Containers became a focus at the company in 2016, when Inventx developers started building and shipping images in Docker. It was clear that adopting a container strategy would be a much more lightweight, portable way to develop, shift and deploy applications. When Kubernetes adoption hastened in 2017, the team looked at management methodologies. They knew a “monocluster” model wouldn’t work; enabling digital transformation meant providing dedicated clusters for each customer, comprising development, testing and production environments. Crucially, the team wanted a unified cluster management platform that would provide simplified, multi-cluster management via a single pane of glass.

Gaining Efficiencies with Rancher

Inventx added Rancher to its existing infrastructure to provide multi-cluster, hybrid support. In Rancher, Inventx was able to manage any number of Kubernetes clusters in one place, via one pane of glass. For the first time, the company could consolidate management processes, monitor performance, update, patch and manage the entire Kubernetes estate in a unified way. Rancher also allowed the team to work with any mix of technologies, in the same platform.

Today, Rancher now underpins ix.AgileFactory. With the financial sector under pressure to be more agile, efficient and secure, Rancher answers those requirements by allowing organizations to manage via a single interface.

With Rancher, Inventx has reduced deployed time by 75 percent and increased deployment frequency by 100 percent. Read our case study to find out how they achieved these and other efficiency gains.