Hua Xia Bank

Company Introduction

Hua Xia Bank started operation in Beijing in October 1992 when China ushered in the program of opening up and reform led by Chief Architect Deng Xiaoping. The Bank became a nationwide joint stock commercial bank after restructuring in March, 1995. In September, 2003, Hua Xia Bank went public as the fifth of Chinese banks listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange (Stock Ticker:600015).

Background

As a financial institution, Huaxia Bank is in progress of FinTech transformation in order to provide technology leading financial services to customers.

In their bank, there are more than 40 first-tier branches nationwide. Each branch has their local banking businesses with many requirements required to be delivered fast. Besides, there are many applications like fund supervision, ETC, payment systems in each branch written in different languages such as C/C++, Java, Python, etc, using traditional monolithic architecture, and deployed on VMs. Moreover, they have a large custom snowflake ecosystem in their development, where each tool needs its own configuration and deployment.

Adopt KubeSphere as the Platform Solution

Huaxia Bank chooses to migrate applications to Kubernetes. we introduces KubeSphere to enhance the Kubernetes platform abilities. With the unified portal to connect DevOps, microservices management and Kubernetes platform in KubeSphere, it help us more easier to adopt cloud native stack. KubeSphere is pretty developer-friendly for novices. With using Istio service mesh, we can easily implement the grayscale release. KubeSphere brings the simplified DevOps workflows to us, and the built-in roles are designed for developers and operators.

Additionally, observability is very critical in daily development and operations. KubeSphere provides centralized log search and monitoring features, which helps us to locate the issues and bottlenecks between different microservices.

Kubernetes is tailored for microservices architecture

As the first team in our bank to adopt Kubernetes since 2019, we are committed to leading FinTech transformation to make technologies boosting financial business innovations. Fortunately, several experimental projects prove that Kubernetes is tailored for microservices architecture, and Kubernetes is a great time-saver for multiple branches in our bank.

When branch developers see how quickly containers could be spun up compared to the VMs process, all branches try to run their applications in containers and ship them in Kubernetes. With Kubernetes and KubeSphere platform, the release process goes from several hours to several minutes, and time to market has also been improved significantly.

• Time to market has been improved significantly

• boosting financial business innovations

• Pretty developer-friendly for novices

Cloud Native is a Great Way to Accelerate the FinTech Transformation

When it comes to the benefits to the ecosystem, we have demonstrated cloud native is great way to accelerate the FinTech transformation. We, as a pioneer in our bank, give some best practices to other projects. Today, developers can quickly deploy, ship code and release their applications written in different languages and frameworks smoothly. Kubernetes provides the tools all we need in the cloud native ecosystem in a consistent way.

About KubeSphere

KubeSphere unifies many cloud native technologies and tools, including Docker, Istio mesh, DevOps, monitoring, logging, etc. We have demonstrated a best practice of using Kubernetes and KubeSphere with multiple branches in our bank.

As for banking industry, most applications must be fault tolerant, highly available and reliable, we demonstrated that even running these applications on Kubernetes can achieve these stringent requirements simultaneously. We hope our user case study will help to promote the wide adoption of Kubernetes in the banking industry.