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A well-executed digital transformation should do much more than keep you competitive… it should also position you to excel by untethering IT staff from low value, labor-intensive tasks, allowing them to focus on innovation and high-impact projects.
Also, replacing (or supplementing) legacy systems with modern technologies can reduce complexity and cost, while also positioning you to leverage cloud-native tools to achieve enhanced business intelligence and key strategic insights.
Finally, with nearly unlimited scalability at your fingertips, applications can scale up and scale down on demand, while you pay only for what you consume. This allows you to maintain a continuously right-sized cost profile, while also accelerating development and reducing procurement cycles.
Download this whitepaper to get a simple, prescriptive guidance to assist with the most important part of your digital transformation: the beginning.
Mambu’s Journey: Modernizing Core Banking with Google Cloud
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When our founders began Mambu in 2011, their goal was to bring the latest digital technologies to the banking and finance world. Banking, in particular, is an industry built on decades of deep legacy technology. So initially, Mambu was embraced by microfinance — 100 organizations in 26 countries in just the first two years.
Since then, acceptance of modernizing core banking services by using composable, cloud technologies has grown across financial services institutions (FSIs). We now service top-tier banks, fintech startups, and other finance organizations across six continents, helping them deliver flexible, personalized, customer-centric banking products and services that their customers can depend upon.
One of the main reasons we’ve been able to scale the Mambu composable banking platform across the globe and at our current pace is our partnership with Google Cloud. The decision to move forward with Google Cloud happened for several reasons.
1. Flexibility and openness. Many FSIs are on hybrid and multicloud technology stacks, as they may still be transitioning from legacy systems, or have data residency requirements that have led them to use different clouds in different regions. Mambu meets customers wherever they are in their cloud journeys. We support interoperability without vendor lock-in. This need for openness, as well as the scalability benefits, led Mambu to evolve our platform on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Many customers use open-source Kubernetes because, this common foundation can help streamline integration, speed up time to market, and reduce development. Just as important, the Google Cloud open cloud approach matches our company values.
2. Security and data residency. For customers in highly regulated finance industries, security isn’t just top of mind, it’s the No. 1 requirement. In addition to Google Cloud’s secure infrastructure, external audit certifications, and encryption, its wide array of regions has allowed us to expand into more countries, where we serve banks that must meet local data residency requirements. For example, Google Cloud’s Jakarta Cloud Region, has allowed us to support Bank Jago in Indonesia as it brings more financial inclusion to the unbanked in that country.
3. Availability. It’s critical for banks to maintain basic financial functionality, like accepting deposits and serving cash, even amid a service disruption. We needed a cloud partner with impeccable redundancy, failover, and disaster recovery capabilities.
In addition to GKE, the Mambu platform uses several other Google Cloud services for specific functions, including Cloud Armor, Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud VPN, Cloud Memorystore, and Google Cloud Operations.
Another important reason we chose to partner with Google Cloud was its expansive ecosystem and commitment to innovation. We are midway into a three-year journey to modernize our own technology stack to meet customer needs.
Building a roadmap with Google Cloud
Our customers need a core banking technology platform that will grow with them as they bring to market innovative services built on the latest technology advances. For Mambu to be that platform, we need a cloud partner that supports and scales with our growth. While we originally built our cloud architecture on GKE and Compute Engine (among a few other Google Cloud services), we’re now looking to a serverless future where we can scale more easily and leverage managed services within Google Cloud and its partner ecosystem to focus on our core offerings.
These are just some of the modernization and customer-led innovations that we’re cooking up:
- More workloads in GKE: Like many companies, our cloud transformation is a work in progress. While much of our codebase is in GKE, we’re continuing to break up some larger pieces of code into microservices to increase agility and velocity, enabling us to make consistent updates to discrete areas of our platform without affecting the whole. GKE is the leader for orchestrating microservices at scale and continues to be a natural fit.
- Native BigQuery integration: Mambu customers collect a tremendous amount of data within the platform that can be used for analytics, personalization, and other use cases. We’re planning to create a seamless integration for feeding core banking data from Mambu into BigQuery so that customers can better leverage their valuable data.
- CloudSQL vs. self-managed MySQL: We have almost completed migrating from our own MySQL instances to managed Cloud SQL databases, which will open up new opportunities to implement customer-centric solutions such as BigQuery integration.
- A serverless future with Cloud Run: Compute Engine is working well for Mambu, providing the flexibility to choose the virtual machines that best balance performance and cost needs. As we seek even more time and cost efficiencies, we believe the elastic scalability of a serverless architecture built on Cloud Run will get us there, and we’re considering going serverless in the future. Doing so would abstract infrastructure for simpler management, while allowing us to fire up containers to meet our customers’ high transactions-per-second needs, spin them down when not needed, and pay only when they run. It would also boost security: Without long-running compute, there are no patches or fixes, and each new instance is isolated and fresh by default.
These are just a handful of examples of the ways we want to best leverage Google Cloud services to simplify how we manage our tech stack, as well as continue to bolster security, scalability, and performance. There are many other ideas we’re exploring: using Dataproc and Datastream to support the specific data needs of Islamic banking, Cloud Functions so that customers can run their own queries against Mambu, and AI-enabled features.
At Mambu, our mission is to empower our customers to deliver great modern financial experiences easily to everyone around the world. Every time Google Cloud opens a new data center, we can enter a new market. Every time we move to a new-to-us managed service via the Google Cloud Marketplace, we free up time to build new ways to deliver customer-centric banking solutions. And so, we look forward to continuing this partnership with Google Cloud well into the future.
Google Extends Support for Windows Server Containers on Anthos for Faster App Modernization and Consistent Dev Experience
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Today, many applications in organizations’ data centers run on Windows Server. Modernizing these traditional Windows apps onto Kubernetes promises a host of benefits: a consistent platform across environments, better portability, scalability, availability, simplified management and speed of deployment, just to name a few. But how? Rewriting traditional .NET applications to run on Linux with .NET Core can be challenging and time-consuming. There is, however, a lower-toil, more developer friendly option.
Last year, we announced support for Windows Server containers running on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), our cloud-based managed Kubernetes service, which lets you take the advantage of containers without porting your apps to .NET core or rewriting them for Linux. Today, we’re going a step further with support for Windows Server containers on Anthos clusters on VMware in your on-premises environment. Now available in preview, you can consolidate all your Windows operations across on-prem and Google Cloud.
Bringing Windows Server support to our family of Kubernetes-based services—GKE running on Google Cloud, and Anthos everywhere—with the same experience, lets you modernize apps faster and achieve a consistent development and deployment experience across hybrid and cloud environments. Further, by running Windows and Linux workloads side by side, you get operational consistency and efficiency—no need to have multiple teams specializing in different tooling or platforms to manage different workloads. The single-pane-of-glass view and the ability to manage policies from a central control plane simplifies the management experience, while bin packing multiple Windows applications drives better resource utilization, leading to infrastructure and license savings.
With all these benefits, it’s no surprise that customers such as Thales, a French multinational firm specializing in aerospace and security services, have been able to reap significant benefits by moving Windows applications to GKE.
“We moved our Windows applications from VMs to Windows containers on GKE and now have a unified mechanism for Linux and Windows-based application management, scaling, logging, and monitoring. Earlier, setting up these applications in VMs and configuring them for high availability used to take up to a week, and the applications were not easily scalable,” said Najam Siddiqui, Solutions Architect at Thales. “Now with GKE, the setup takes only a few minutes. GKE’s automatic scaling and built-in resiliency features make scaling and high-availability setup seamless. Also, manually maintaining the VMs and applying security patches used to be tedious, which is now handled by GKE.”
Let’s take a deeper look at the architecture that lets you run your Windows container-based workloads on-prem.
Windows Server running on-prem with Anthos
The diagram below illustrates the high-level architecture of running Windows container-based workloads in an on-prem GKE cluster with Anthos. Windows server node-pools can be added to an existing or new Anthos cluster. Kubelet and Kube-proxy run natively on Windows nodes, allowing you to run mixed Windows and Linux containers in the same cluster. The admin cluster and the user cluster control plane continue to be Linux-based, providing you a consistent orchestration experience and management ease across Windows and Linux workloads.
Get started today
When considering modernizing your on-prem Windows estate, we recommend running Windows Server containers on Anthos in your own data center. If you are new to Anthos, the Anthos getting started page and the Coursera course on Architecting Hybrid Cloud with Anthos are good places to start. You can also find detailed documentation on our website, and our partners are eager to help you with any questions related to the published solutions, as is the GCP sales team. And as always, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at anthos-onprem-windows@google.com if you have any feedback or need help unblocking your use case.
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What’s Google Cloud Firestore Database and What are its Benefits for Business and Developers?
Cloud Firestore is a NoSQL document database that simplifies storing, syncing, and querying data for your mobile and web apps at global scale.
Cloud Firestore is a fast, fully managed, serverless, cloud-native NoSQL document database that simplifies storing, syncing, and querying data for your mobile, web, and IoT apps at global scale.
Its client libraries provide live synchronization and offline support, while its security features and integrations with Firebase and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) accelerate building truly serverless apps.
Here’s other stuff it’s good at:
Sync data across devices, on or offline
With Cloud Firestore, your applications can be updated in near real time when data on the back end changes. This is not only great for building collaborative multi-user mobile applications, but also means you can keep your data in sync with individual users who might want to use your app from multiple devices.
With Firebase Realtime Database, we felt we had built the best force-plate testing software on the market. Thanks to Cloud Firestore, in only two weeks, we built a system that’s significantly better and includes features we never thought possible to ship on Day 1.
Chris Wales, CTO, Hawkin Dynamics
Cloud Firestore has full offline support, so you can access and make changes to your data, and those changes will be synced to the cloud when the client comes back online. Built-in offline support leverages local cache to serve and store data, so your app remains responsive regardless of network latency or internet connectivity.
Simple and effortless
Cloud Firestore’s robust client libraries make it easy for you to update and receive new data while worrying less about establishing network connections or unforeseen race conditions. It can scale effortlessly as your app grows. Cloud Firestore allows you to run sophisticated queries against your data. This gives you more flexibility in the way you structure your data and can often mean that you have to do less filtering on the client, which keeps your network calls and data usage more efficient.
Enterprise-grade, scalable NoSQL
Cloud Firestore is a fast and fully managed NoSQL cloud database. It is built to scale and takes advantage of GCP’s powerful infrastructure, with automatic horizontal scaling in and out, in response to your application’s load. Security access controls for data are built in and enable you to handle data validation via a configuration language.
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Across industries, CEOs share a top priority—harness technology to jump-start growth, accelerate time to market, and foster innovation. CIOs and other technology leaders recognize that the C-suite depends on them to achieve growth and meet rising expectations for agility.
They increasingly view IT modernization—including migrating to the cloud, adopting new application architectures, and building on cloud-native services—as a way to sustain these goals. To date, however, most companies have not captured the anticipated agility benefits because a number of challenges hinder technology leaders as they push ahead with modernization initiatives.
While many of these challenges are valid, there are some false tradeoffs that can be avoided. New McKinsey research highlights that cloud migration needs to be combined with a comprehensive organizational approach to allow for a much more effective agile transformation. CIOs need to promote the transformation mind-set of focusing on differentiated business value by adopting agile processes, automating policies, and upskilling talent across the entire organization. They need to look beyond technology to change the way their IT organization operates across three foundational elements—people, processes, and policies.
Priorities include upskilling existing talent and creating new roles (such as site reliability engineers, full-stack engineers, and data scientists), revamping procedures by adopting agile
development processes with security integrated into every step, and enforcing policies through automation.
Download this McKinsey research report to understand the practices of leaders versus that of laggards and get the key “unlocks” that can help organizations move to higher levels of business agility as they pursue increased cloud adoption.
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