Orange Bank Gains Control of IT Systems Using Ippon and AWS

France’s Orange Bank, a pioneer in fully mobile banking, relies on simplicity and innovative services to stand out from its competitors. To gain control of its IT, standardize tools and practices, and set up a DevOps environment it decided to migrate to Amazon Web Services (AWS), with the help of AWS Partner Ippon Technologies. Orange Bank now has the agility it needs for future projects, while gaining security and limiting its resource requirements thanks to managed services.

Orange Bank is a subsidiary of mobile telco Orange, and is committed to 100 percent mobile banking. Originally launched by Groupama, it was bought by Orange in 2016, to strengthen its banking service offering. “After the purchase, Orange decided to rebuild the entire IT system,” explains Alexandre Fedi, lead FinOps and project management officer at Orange Bank.

Orange Bank found both development operations challenging with the existing system. “We didn’t have access to the machinery and tools that it was built for,” says Fedi “This created a break in our delivery chain, which led to several problems, in particular long delays in putting the different versions into production, and the late discovery of problems, sometimes even in production or preproduction, which we had very little time to resolve.”

To meet development, build, service, and agility requirements in a timely manner, Orange Bank set out to transform the infrastructure it had inherited. It needed a migration to the cloud to remedy these difficulties and provide continuity of the end-to-end delivery chain, while also simplifying and standardizing the tools used. To help with its migration to AWS, Orange Bank chose AWS Partner Ippon Technologies.

An initial proof of concept (PoC) was developed with Orange, as the group had its own public cloud offering. However major constraints—particularly in terms of security and compliance, imposed by the supervisory authorities —made it impractical to follow that path. That led to the choice of AWS. “The catalog of available services is extensive, it is a market leader, and it was consistent with our technological choices,” says Fedi. In addition, Orange Bank Spain, which was opening at the time, was also on AWS. With a view to future synergies, the choice of AWS was obvious.

To help organize and implement the migration, Orange Bank wanted a partner that would offer end-toend support, actively participate in every part of the process, but also remain independent and able to challenge decisions. The company was already working with Ippon on aspects of development and architecture and liked what it saw. It chose Ippon Technologies to help make the migration a reality. “We were interested in having consistency in the way things worked and in the support provided and Ippon had already proven itself,” says Fedi. “It was the obvious choice.”

For Ippon, it was important to look at the migration as something of a fresh start. “The changes were farreaching. It wasn’t just a migration,” says Damien Rollet, cloud and DevOps architect at Ippon. “It was a matter of rebuilding Orange Bank’s entire setup from scratch, with tools, monitoring, security, just everything.” The infrastructure went from virtual machines with dedicated servers to host Java applications, to containerized environments using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed Kubernetes service to run Kubernetes in the AWS and on-premises data centers.

Orange Bank wanted to migrate to the cloud and optimize its solution without interrupting the business. “We have containerized nearly 80 percent of our applications to make them more resilient, but we also wanted to take advantage of the power of the cloud without re-platforming everything,” says Fedi.

Ippon and Orange Bank also made other changes. Databases were migrated from Oracle to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL on RDS—which can set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud with just a few clicks. This was done using AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), which helps users migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. The databases are run in managed service, simplifying operations. “Using managed services meant we didn’t have to recruit database administrators to manage our databases, and to really concentrate on the software part and delegate the hardware part,” says Fedi.

Orange Bank has also switched entirely to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to provide reliability and control over infrastructure configuration. “All of this makes it possible to check the quality of the infrastructure and the quality of the services provided. It also makes it possible to check the quality of the code that is delivered, and to have a repository that no longer needs to be documented by hand but is documented in the code directly,” says Fedi.

The migration was carried out in an iterative and modular way, each application being a specific project. To limit changes during the migration, application freezes were put in place for each asset to avoid side effects or regressions. In parallel with this IT overhaul, Orange Bank also adapted its organization. “There was a real internal transformation, moving from traditional team management to a DevOps spirit, taking the lead from the development teams,” says Rollet. “This also encouraged us to migrate gradually, so that the teams could be set up, train, and build up their skills.”

The migration project is now complete. There are still a few elements hosted by Groupama, but that will soon end. And while precise measurements are still pending, Orange Bank has made significan improvements. “Our new model gives us both very strong traceability and much greater service resilience and reduced incidents,” says Fedi. “Infrastructure costs have also been reduced, thanks to the skill of Ippon and the adoption of FinOps best practices from the start of the project. Today, Orange Bank is taking full advantage of the service catalog offered by AWS.”