Inventx is the pioneer of the ix.AgileFactory, a full stack DevOps platform designed to meet the unique needs of the Swiss financial community. Founded in 2010, the company is headquartered in Chur, Switzerland, and has more than 260 employees.
The ix.AgileFactory portfolio of products allows financial institutions to digitize their technology infrastructure to become more cloud native and microservices-centric. Underpinned by Docker, Kubernetes, Rancher Prime and Red Hat, ix.AgileFactory allows organizations to implement microservices and consider hybrid cloud and on-premises deployments to reduce cost.
The platform allows the decoupling of core applications from the central infrastructure, enabling organizations to better manage and innovate in applications in safety, without affecting mission-critical systems. Most importantly, ix.AgileFactory is completely technology and environment agnostic; financial customers can choose any variety of software and tooling and host them in any environment — in the data center, in the cloud and at the edge.
At-a-Glance
Inventx is the Swiss IT partner of choice for leading financial and insurance service providers. Like many financial institutions, the major focus for Inventx’s technology team is to drive scale, control and speed into its architecture. Working with Kubernetes and Rancher Prime, Inventx has created major efficiencies and has boosted the adoption of Kubernetes across the organization.
The Journey to Containers
Like most companies working in the financial space, Inventx has a secure, on-premises 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. Consequently, the team has invested heavily in transforming the infrastructure, while maintaining security posture and regulatory compliance.
Containers became a focus in 2016 when developers started building and shipping images in Docker. For senior cloud engineer and solution architect, Domenic Mayer, it soon became clear that adopting a container strategy would be a much more lightweight, portable way to develop, shift and deploy applications. At this early stage, there were a couple of Linux VMs with Docker installed — single nodes without any cluster functionality or automation. Failover was managed by the virtualization hypervisor.
To hasten development through automation and to bring some control to their Docker instances, Mayer and the team started working with Docker Swarm. Concurrently, one of the company’s major customers was building its digitization strategy and required software developers to write and shape software as Docker images. They needed an orchestrator and turned to Inventx to provide one, prompting Mayer and the team to begin a major market evaluation.
Kubernetes immediately emerged as the most flexible, open and mature container orchestration solution when compared to DC/OS and Apache Mesos. With rapid growth on the horizon and a clear multi-cluster strategy in mind, the team realized it needed a unified management plane to provide the right multi-cluster support.
Trials soon took place with Red Hat OpenShift, Mesosphere and Rancher Prime. During this process, it was clear that the team needed a platform-oriented solution that would support a multi-cluster environment. That’s where Rancher Prime came in.
“Our portfolio is geared toward creating long-term digital business models in the financial industry. Inventx is the enabler for continuous business transformation. Rancher Prime brings the flexibility and openness that helps us to achieve true transformation in the most agile and efficient way.”
What were the challenges Inventx wanted to solve?
Enabling Digital Transformation — Unified Multi-Cluster Management
Kubernetes adoption started to hasten in 2017. Clusters were appearing in growing numbers and so, when the team looked at management methodologies, it already 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. Whichever platform the team chose had to bring simplified, multi-cluster management via a single pane of glass.
Having been working happily with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ansible for years, it made sense to keep this solid core and add Rancher Prime to the stack to provide the right multi-cluster, hybrid support Inventx needed. There was no formal Proof of Concept, but a lot of experimentation within developer teams. Even at version 1.6, Rancher Prime was well known and so, when Rancher Prime 2.0 was released, the team began a digital transformation project with one of its customers.
In Rancher Prime, 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 Prime also allowed the team to work with any mix of technologies, in the same platform — Docker, Kubernetes and OpenShift, if customers required it.
The initial innovation project was so successful that it became the backbone of Inventx’s bespoke end-to-end management platform, ix.AgileFactory — a standardized, high-security framework, underpinned by a selection of powerful solutions, including Rancher Prime, that brings flexibility, scalability and efficiency to customer deployments.
Working with Rancher Prime, the team has achieved several significant efficiencies. Environment deployment time is now down to a couple of days from months. Historically, the team had to define the environment, build the servers, manage the integration and perform security audits. In Rancher Prime, the development environment already exists within the platform, leaving developers to configure and deploy applications in a fraction of the time.
IX.AgileFactory — Accelerating Development Velocity
Rancher Prime now underpins Inventx’s flagship offering — ix.AgileFactory — a cloud-based PaaS platform that significantly simplifies and accelerates enterprise digitization. The financial sector is under more pressure than ever before to become more technologically agile. It wants to be more efficient and secure, while capitalizing on the best open source and proprietary solutions. Companies also want to manage via one single interface. With Rancher Prime at its heart, ix.AgileFactory brings this capability.
In ix.AgileFactory platform design, operating concept and “run and deploy” services can be customized. In the multi-party system of ix.AgileFactory, financial institutions can issue compliance authorization for access, development and administration of the container clusters to its software and fintech partners. Each individual service can be developed, released, maintained and scaled for itself without the entire infrastructure being affected. Microservices can be provided by the financial institution itself, but also by software partners and fintechs and can be easily integrated via open interfaces (APIs), so that very large and differentiating customer benefits can be achieved quickly.
Kubernetes and Rancher Prime, Docker and Red Hat combine to give a high degree of automation, leaner architectures, scalability, low costs and more efficient application operation and maintenance. Several customers are now running production and nonproduction clusters on ix.AgileFactory. Many are using the environment to develop new digital services such as loyalty and cash-back features. With early projects proving successful, some are starting to migrate more mission-critical, customer-facing services to the platform.
Using the initial customer deployment as a blueprint for new customers, ix.AgileFactory now hosts nine separate nonproduction (dev/test) and production environments for three different customers, with more following suit.
A Hybrid Aspiration — Becoming More Cloud Native
While the stringent regulatory framework surrounding the Swiss financial sector has forced a historical focus on secure, on-premises deployments, there is a recognition that embracing the cloud will bring flexibility and economies. Of course, one of Inventx’s major unique selling propositions (USPs) is its focus on operating solely in Switzerland; all the company’s data centers are located within the country’s boundaries. This is essential in meeting particularly stringent Swiss data laws — working in Rancher Prime helps to streamline regulatory and compliance.
The increasing intensity of competition is forcing the Swiss financial and insurance industry to innovate and launch new services faster. At the same time, the complexity and density of regulations are increasing which, naturally, has led to rising costs. For Inventx’s customers, cloud services are becoming more important to drive flexibility, agility and innovation — while reducing costs at the same time.
ix.AgileFactory is an intrinsic part of ix.Cloud, also known as Inventx’s Swiss Financial Community Cloud. Each specific application can be assigned to an optimal cloud environment. Depending on their business-critical relevance, the data is hosted and managed either in the highly secure private cloud or the public cloud. The flexibility to choose the location of workloads, and to port them between environments is critical here — both to maintain the security posture and to keep costs low.
While cloud migration is becoming more popular in the financial and insurance sector, Mayer and the team recognize the importance of keeping some highly sensitive applications and services in the data center.
Inventx designed the Swiss Financial Community Cloud as a hybrid cloud from the start and it can be easily embedded in an existing environment (on-premises). Public clouds and SaaS offerings can be integrated as required. Working in the open and agnostic environment ix.AgileFactory provides, customers have the choice.
Finally, working with technology partners like SUSE, Inventx can help Swiss financial institutions work toward being officially recognized as innovators. Switzerland is comprised of 26 Cantons (regions), each with their own Cantonal Banks. As the market becomes more crowded, a third of these banks are already working with Inventx and are seen as some of the most innovative in Switzerland.