KeyBank Goes Cloud-Native, Builds a DevOps Practice and Chooses Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that KeyBank, one of the United States’ largest bank-based financial services companies, used the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to expand the bank’s digital banking capabilities.

As with many large companies, KeyBank found that application delivery resulted in complexity growth over time, with slow manual testing, quarterly release cycles and outages resulting in poor Mean-to-time-Resolution (MTTR).

Among other changes, KeyBank created a DevOps practice that could create a culture of innovation and quickly look at the marketplace for tools that could help increase agility and customer experience. KeyBank’s DevOps team wanted to embrace an approach that also provided greater security for customer information. Like all large financial services organizations, the bank adheres to complex regulatory requirements that can make it challenging to move even simple changes into production.

To help meet these goals, KeyBank’s DevOps team began considering a container-based application platform, seeking to decrease complexity by isolating applications from the underlying infrastructure and helping development teams get to work with minimal configuration and management time.

The Linux container space, however, was quickly evolving, so KeyBank wanted a trusted partner to not only help them tap into the open source community around containers but also to help them move containers into production in a more secure and stable manner. Red Hat, a top contributor to both the Docker and Kubernetes open source projects, and its award-winning Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform fit KeyBank’s criteria.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is the first and only container-centric, hybrid cloud solution built from the Docker, Kubernetes, Project Atomic and OpenShift Origin upstream projects and based on the trusted backbone of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform provides a more secure, stable platform for container-based deployments without sacrificing current IT investments, allowing for mission-critical, traditional applications to coexist alongside new, cloud-native and container-based applications.

As KeyBank already had an existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment, deploying Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform allowed them to retain consistency across their infrastructure footprints. When challenges did arise, KeyBank’s IT team knew that they could call on Red Hat’s award-winning Global Support Services organization to share best practices and provide the world-class support that they needed to continue running at scale.

In seven months, KeyBank completed product evaluation, selection, and migration of multiple applications to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, and built its container-centric environments for development, testing, staging and production. KeyBank also created a continuous delivery pipeline to automate the majority of application development tasks through Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, enabling developers to focus on moving quickly to market, reliability, and quality.

Within its continuous delivery culture and in response to customer input, KeyBank can now look forward to application release cycles with little to no downtime. Additionally, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is now integrated with KeyBank’s automated testing, with analysis showing that 60 percent of defects are now resolved within a day.

KeyBank now plans to spread its DevOps teams into other projects in order to help scale the practice across the organization.

“When we completed our initial technology review, we found that there was really only one software vendor investing in the capabilities of Docker and Kubernetes while providing the support and enterprise-grade hardening that we required in a production container platform. That company was Red Hat and the product was OpenShift. OpenShift meets these goals with the utilization of Docker that simplifies Infrastructure engineering, delivery, and support; moreover, Kubernetes provides the robust reliability and service levels a flagship application requires for a large enterprise.” — John Rzeszotarski, director of DevOps, KeyBank