The bank provides a wide range of services, including personal, corporate and business banking, as well as investment and wealth management in accordance with regional principles. A digital innovator, the bank empowers customers to engage seamlessly online, on mobile and in its branch network.
At-a-Glance
To take and hold the lead in its regional digital banking market, a prominent financial institution has partnered with SUSE and AWS to help drive its digital-first strategy. With SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server underpinning its microservices architecture across AWS and on-premises environments, the bank can spin up new apps in minutes, maintain high levels of security and deliver 24/7 financial services to its customers.
The journey to containers
The organization strives to differentiate itself by delivering more responsive customer services. To achieve this goal, the bank has embraced a digital-first strategy — helping it deliver a 100% digital onboarding journey for new customers.
Monolithic IT architectures remain very common in banking but are often a roadblock to digital innovation. To avoid obstacles in its pursuit of cutting-edge banking, the IT team chose an agile DevOps approach supported by flexible, API-enabled microservices.
Early on its digital-first journey, the bank began using Kubernetes clusters to help it spin up new services quickly. However, as its containerized environments grew, managing and maintaining the clusters became an increasing challenge.
“With vanilla Kubernetes, our development team spent significant time in the console using kubectl commands to manage resources and deploy applications,” says the spokesperson. “On the management side, it was very difficult for us to deliver fine-grained user access control — a key capability for regulatory compliance.”
“Without a doubt, SUSE Rancher Prime and AWS are helping us accelerate the delivery of digital products to the business. The initial setup for SUSE Rancher Prime took around two days. Now, we can spin up a new RKE2 environment on AWS or on-premises in as little as 30 minutes.”
Spokesperson,
Leading Bank
Why SUSE Rancher Prime?
The organization adopted SUSE Rancher Prime, an end-to-end platform for cluster management. SUSE Rancher Prime provides a single point of control for your infrastructure, backed by responsive support from SUSE experts, while streamlining compliance.
“We assessed three leading container management vendors against a core set of selection criteria, and SUSE was the only provider that met all our requirements,” recalls the spokesperson. “As well as being an open source solution, SUSE Rancher Prime has an excellent reputation for its stability, reliability and ease of deployment. We also found the SUSE solution to be one of the most cost-effective, especially considering the high quality of their support services.”
Within days of selecting SUSE Rancher Prime, the bank imported its clusters to the new solution and integrated it with its Microsoft Active Directory platform. In total, the organization uses SUSE Rancher Prime to manage five clusters deployed on-premises and on the AWS cloud. “The initial deployment was very easy and the integration with Active Directory was very straightforward,” says the spokesperson.
By selecting SUSE Rancher Prime, the bank also gains integrated access to both Fleet — a GitOps-driven continuous delivery component for faster, more efficient application deployments — and SUSE Observability — a built-in solution that streamlines monitoring, logging and troubleshooting across Kubernetes clusters via OpenTelemetry integration.
“Adopting SUSE Rancher Prime with Fleet allowed us to create a standard template for microservices that cuts deployment time,” comments the spokesperson. “And with SUSE Observability, we get monitoring, logging and OpenTelemetry integration in a single solution — making it easier to identify and diagnose performance issues with our microservices.”
Why SUSE Linux Enterprise Server?
SUSE Linux offers a powerfully robust foundation for SUSE Rancher Prime that can speed up incident resolutions, delivering comprehensive support that spans from the underlying infrastructure through to the container management layer.
From the start, the bank sought a single-vendor solution throughout the entire container management stack, making SUSE Linux Enterprise Server a natural choice.
“We wanted the peace of mind that comes with having a single channel for support from the operating system up,” comments the spokesperson. “SUSE Linux Enterprise Server gives us a lightweight, stable and cost-effective foundation for SUSE Rancher Prime. It also allows us to patch our systems with zero downtime, which helps us deliver 24/7 banking services to our customers.”
The impact of SUSE solutions
Deploys containerized environments in minutes
By deploying SUSE Rancher Prime, the bank eliminates the complexity of managing a hybrid cloud environment. Today, it can orchestrate Kubernetes clusters across AWS and on-premises systems from a single point of control within SUSE Rancher Prime — saving valuable time.
“Without a doubt, SUSE Rancher Prime and AWS are helping us accelerate the delivery of digital products to the business,” states the spokesperson. “The initial setup for SUSE Rancher Prime took around two days. Now, we can spin up a new RKE2 environment on AWS or on-premises in as little as 30 minutes.”
Delivers granular access management
The bank operates in a highly regulated industry, where information security and data governance are crucial. With SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, the organization can easily keep pace with regular security patches, kernel updates, Kubernetes upgrades and compliance requirements — ensuring its entire infrastructure stack, from operating system to container orchestration, remains consistently secure, compliant and resilient.
“We use Rancher's next-generation Kubernetes distribution, RKE2,” explains the spokesperson. “In just a couple of clicks, we can upgrade all our RKE2 clusters via the Rancher console with zero impact on production services. And thanks to integration with Active Directory, it’s also easy for us to deliver fine-grained control over user access rights in SUSE Rancher Prime, whether in AWS or on-premises.”
Achieves zero downtime over three years
A key element of the bank’s offering is 24/7 banking services, which means the organization needs to ensure that its containerized services are running around the clock. With SUSE Rancher Prime, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and AWS, the organization can keep this promise to its customers.
The spokesperson confirms: “Since we went live, we’ve not had a single instance of downtime attributable to SUSE Rancher Prime; the solution is rock solid.”
Saves $28,000 per year
Unlike some of the other global vendors that the bank evaluated, SUSE’s solutions deliver these benefits while keeping operational costs lean.
“Our subscription fee for SUSE Rancher Prime is around 90% less than what another global container management solution provider quoted us for essentially the same capabilities,” comments the spokesperson. “Because our Rancher subscription includes Fleet, we’ve also been able to replace our previous GitOps solution — saving us $28,000 a year.”
Ensures rapid access to support services
With expert, on-demand support from SUSE, the bank has the confidence that its mission-critical systems will always be available for its employees and customers.
“Our SUSE solutions are so stable that we’ve hardly ever needed to call on SUSE — but whenever we’ve needed them, they’ve always responded rapidly,” says the spokesperson. “For example, when we experienced a critical issue during a cluster upgrade, the SUSE team jumped in to help us solve the problem quickly and meet our internal SLAs.”
What's next for the bank?
Today, more than 70% of the digital services at the organization run on Rancher RKE2 clusters across AWS and on-premises, including the systems that support the organization’s retail, corporate, investment banking and trading divisions. RKE2 also supports the API-enabled infrastructure that facilitates data interchange between the bank’s digital applications and core banking systems.
“We’re preparing to deploy a new data lake on AWS to feed the growing appetite for analytics insights across the bank, and this will also run an RKE2 cluster,” concludes the spokesperson. “SUSE Rancher Prime is a core component of our Kubernetes infrastructure, and we’re looking forward to building on the great success we’ve had with SUSE and AWS.”