Digital transformation is an increasingly popular topic in the banking and financial services industry. This change is triggered by the need to offer top-notch solutions to increase agility, operational efficiency, and improve customer service. These organizations need to ensure that their applications and infrastructure are scalable, performance-oriented, and highly responsive. These technologies also need to conform to regulatory and compliance standards.
The Challenge
Atlassian tools used by over 30,000 users were plagued with performance issues and severely impacting user experience & productivity. Frequent downtimes were also becoming the norm for the organization. They also struggled with other issues like:
- Their legacy infrastructure did not meet enterprise standards and was in urgent need of migration to a more robust architecture.
- Application access was happening over HTTP instead of HTTPS, and unsupported JDK and OS versions were in use, violating enterprise security standards.
- The customer’s internal policy strictly does not allow username/password-based authentication with the applications. Instead, it was a strict requirement that users must be authenticated via the Single Sign-On provided using the bank’s standard SSO system. Integration was required between Bank’s Single Sign-On and Atlassian Crowd for the authentication and authorization of the Atlassian applications.
- Legacy infrastructure was used for hosting the previous implementation of the custom Single Sign-On system which was a single point of failure because it was a monolithic process running on a single server built on a deprecated version of Java.
- The previous version of the custom SSO solution introduced unnecessary delays in the application traffic because authentication checks were performed for each HTTP request.
- The environment could no longer support the growing scale of the organization.
The company also realized that many of its applications no longer supported current Atlassian versions. The unstable application environments impacted a large number of users who were dependent on them. That quickly became a huge cause of concern for the leadership team.
The Addteq Solution
After careful consideration of our client’s challenges, we suggested that they migrate all of their server applications to Atlassian Data Center. The main benefit for the client to migrate to Atlassian Data Center was to improve performance and support, for a large number of users. With Atlassian Data Center, the company’s development teams can enjoy high availability, performance at scale, instant scalability, deployment flexibility, and disaster recovery.
Given our deep expertise in Atlassian products, we were able to automate the Data Center deployment and data migration steps, using Ansible. We also suggested to version control the Ansible scripts so they could be reused for future upgrades, or on multiple environments. We made sure all the configuration changes could be done consistently on all of the new Data Center nodes.
Addteq also implemented a custom application to provide Single sign-on for Atlassian and non-Atlassian applications using the customer’s standard SSO system and Atlassian Crowd.
Given the business impact and the mission-critical nature of these applications, we had to make sure that there was minimal downtime during this upgrade and migration process.
The Outcome
Addteq was able to successfully migrate and implement a 30,000 user instance of Atlassian Data Center. Upgrading these critical Atlassian tools were imperative to enabling enterprise-scale features with multiple application nodes, that this client desperately needed.
The outcome of Addteq’s efforts can be summarized as follows:
- Optimized deployment time on multiple nodes and environments as a result of automating the application deployment and configuration process using Ansible.
- Automation of future upgrades as scripts were generalized and version-controlled in Bitbucket.
- All applications were migrated to an enterprise-level database like Oracle
- Better availability and automatic failover enabled by implementing F5 load balancers
- Improved concurrent user capacity and response time, validated with capacity planning and load testing.
- After migration, users can seamlessly connect to the new environment with existing permissions and entitlements via SSO.
- Improved application stability and performance
With the combination of our collaboration with the customer, a high range of technical expertise, and the knowledge as a Platinum Atlassian Partner, we were successfully able to migrate our large financial services client to Atlassian Data Center.
