Microsoft BFSI
Microsoft and its partner ecosystem help banks reduce cost and risk, modernize core systems and delight customers and employees to achieve differentiation and spur sustainable growth. With the migration from AWS to Azure, Backbase is now proudly part of Microsoft’s partner ecosystem and is eager to accelerate innovation in banking across the globe!
From AWS to Azure in Four Steps
In October 2021, with the help of Xebia, Backbase began migrating from AWS to Azure. Chris van Sluijsveld, Consultant at Xebia, comments: "Our assignment was to bring BaaS from AWS to Azure, a 2-year project with a team of sixteen people from Xebia and Backbase. We started with a PoC, then we onboarded new customers, and now we're migrating current customers from AWS to Azure. The goal is to have all of them on Azure by the end of 2023."
The migration followed these four steps:
I. Aim for First-Time-Right
The first step in this migration process was discovery — getting to know the product, determining what features are there now, and what features are wanted. This input then forms the basis for a reference architecture that reveals what the product will look like on Azure. Next, four workstreams were set up (Access, Runtimes, CI/CD, and Experimentation) that started working on the MVP/PoC according to the requirements.
“Because of the many people we spoke to in the preliminary phase, we had the right input to create a reference architecture that suited Backbase very well. The MVP was ‘First-Time-Right’ and thus the foundation for the final product,” Jelmer de Jong, Consultant at Xebia, adds.
II. Move Beyond Feature Parity
Van Sluijsveld, “To decide what products we would use, we looked at what Backbase was using on AWS, what the equivalent would be on Azure, and whether it could handle the same scale, for example. In this 'product shoot out,' we worked with Backbase to make all the choices for the new products."
The initial goal was feature parity, but along the way, the migration proved to be a vehicle for a complete upgrade of Backbase’s SaaS product at both the application and the infrastructure level. “For example, we replaced MySQL with MSSQL, and by using Argo CD instead of Flux CD, we now have much more insight into what the application is doing,” De Jong adds.
“Switching to one identity provider (Azure AD), and implementing the principle of least privilege, helped Backbase grow security maturity. Last but not least, we undertook a huge harmonization effort, moving all CI/CD tooling (Bitbucket, Jenkins, and GitHub Cloud) to one centrally managed GitHub Enterprise Managed Cloud offering," Van Sluijsveld concludes.
