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About SBI BITS

• Established in 2015 to deliver IT services and infrastructure to SBI Group
• SBI Group is one of Japan’s leading financial services providers
• The group includes the country’s largest online securities company, largest venture capital firm, and one of its foremost long-term credit banks

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SBI Group relies on SBI BITS for critical IT infrastructure, and SBI BITS relies on
Canonical OpenStack

To move its mission critical workloads onto the newest version of OpenStack, SBI BITS needed an expertly designed and carefully executed migration strategy that would not disrupt ongoing operations. With the help of Canonical’s support and consulting services, the organization successfully implemented three new OpenStack environments and began a phased migration that is ensuring business continuity. SBI BITS can now serve its customers more effectively than ever with the latest OpenStack features; and for workloads that can’t be moved, Canonical is providing legacy support to keep the environment secure.

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Challenge

In 2018, SBI BITS decided to transition from traditional virtualization to OpenStack. As the organization responsible for delivering IT infrastructure to the rest of SBI Group, SBI BITS needed to be able to allocate compute resources quickly and effectively. OpenStack was the ideal solution to enable SBI BITS to meet growing customer demand and ensure users got the resources they needed without bottlenecks. More specifically, Canonical OpenStack was the ideal solution – SBI BITS chose Canonical’s OpenStack distribution to benefit from its unrivaled price-performance and flexibility, and Canonical’s extensive OpenStack expertise.

SBI BITS uses Canonical OpenStack to deliver corporate infrastructure and support numerous mission-critical workloads across SBI entities. For example, the OpenStack cloud hosts the log-in authentication service for SBI Securities, Japan’s largest online securities company.

These workloads demand the highest levels of performance and stability. So, as the version of OpenStack that SBI BITS was running approached end of support, the organization knew that it needed to migrate to a newer release to access the latest features and ensure continued security. However, SBI BITS’ unique circumstances made upgrading its OpenStack environment a challenge.

A spokesperson at SBI BITS explains: “With so many companies relying on this cloud for key financial services workloads, we couldn’t afford any disruption to ongoing operations”.

To maintain business continuity, SBI BITS needed to carefully design and execute an incremental migration strategy, moving workloads to the new OpenStack version in a controlled way. No easy task – but fortunately, Canonical was on hand to help.

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Solution

SBI BITS retains the services of a Canonical Dedicated Support Engineer (DSE). This is a Canonical engineer whose entire role is committed to supporting SBI BITS. The DSE gives SBI BITS access to the highest level of Canonical OpenStack expertise, and thanks to the engineer’s dedicated focus on a single customer, this expertise is coupled with close to 100% knowledge of the entire SBI BITS environment.

The spokesperson continues: “We initially chose the DSE package when we were getting to grips with OpenStack and we needed to supplement our engineering resources while the cloud business was growing rapidly. Now, he’s like another member of my team – and I’m picky about my team members. He knows how the finserv industry works; he understands that we have to go through a process and can’t just fix things like a cowboy”.

The DSE was perfectly positioned to plan the OpenStack migration, and they were on the ground to ensure that the project ran smoothly. The strategy that the DSE designed with SBI BITS was to implement three new OpenStack environments and gradually migrate workloads away from the existing deployment.

The caveat: some key workloads were not ready to be migrated and still depended on the previous version of OpenStack. To address this, Canonical is providing legacy support for the 2018 environment spanning 224 nodes. This enabled SBI BITS to avoid the risk of migrating these workloads, and ensure they would continue to be protected against security vulnerabilities.

“Canonical understands that there is business in this legacy cloud,” comments SBI BITS. “Their support gives us time to carefully plan how to migrate these workloads that can’t be moved immediately. That flexibility is invaluable”.

To accelerate deployment of the new environments, SBI BITS also opted for Canonical’s Onboarding Service. Canonical Field Engineers worked on-site to support the cloud validation and migration, and provide knowledge transfer. The service reduced time-to-deployment by more than 50%, with the project completed in just seven months rather than an estimated two years.

Last but not least, SBI BITS also implemented MicroK8s for its Gitlab runners and CI/CD pipeline. The company had previously experimented with vanilla Kubernetes, but found it to be excessively complex for their use case.

“I saw a presentation from Mark Shuttleworth that showed me how easy it was to set up MicroK8s, and how we could get just the features and components that we needed for our specific application. It was a perfect fit. MicroK8s makes it easy to scale up, easy to scale down, and it’s a large improvement over creating VMs for different runners”.

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Results

With the help of Canonical’s support services, SBI BITS is successfully migrating to the new Canonical OpenStack environments. And crucially, the company is able to complete the move at its own pace, without disrupting any of the ongoing operations across SBI Group.

And Canonical’s support doesn’t stop with the DSE and Onboarding Service. SBI BITS also has its own Customer Success Manager (CSM) providing holistic post-sales support.

“Our CSM brings a lot of value in making sure our voice is heard”, adds the spokesperson. “She really understands our culture, she helps with issues on the support portal, and she follows up with engineers. It really makes a difference”.

The final piece of the puzzle is 24x7 support. If SBI BITS ever encounters a problem, no matter the time or day, Canonical is always available to help immediately. This breadth of coverage has proven highly valuable, with approximately 20% of cases occurring outside of APAC business hours.

“I always envy Canonical’s follow-the-sun support model. It’s great knowing that you can get support at any time, and from somebody who’s fresh and not tired”.

The combination of Canonical OpenStack, DSE, Field Engineering, CSM, and 24x7 support takes all the complexity away from maintaining and operating the private cloud, and enables SBI BITS to seamlessly deliver resources precisely when and where they are needed by the wider SBI Group.

“We’ve never considered switching providers”, concludes SBI BITS. “No other vendor could give us a perfect solution. We’ve built a great relationship with Canonical and the economics are good”.