We're going to deploy the entire core banking of the bank on the platform.

It helps us through consolidation, ease of use, portability, and because I can use microservices. It's like a one-stop shop for most of my containerized applications that are going to be deployed.

The most valuable features are that

• it's cloud agnostic
• the containerization and security features are outstanding.

The cloud-agnostic aspect means I can move to AWS, Google, or Azure. That means it is not a limitation. It gives me flexibility.

For running business-critical applications, on a scale of one to five, where five is the best, OpenShift is 4.8.

Room for improvement is around the offerings that come as a bundle with the container platform. The packaging of the platform should be done such that customers do not have to purchase additional licenses.

They should partner with Jenkins. It goes without saying that I need Jenkins for my CICD. If Jenkins comes with support, that's good. But if there is a licensed product, I need to secure that license and then I will get support.

Although the bundling with OCP is better than that offered by others, they can work more on it.

We implemented OpenShift in January 2023, so about six months ago, but we have not fully used it. It's the first time that we've installed it, and we're yet to implement.

It's pretty scalable because of the architecture. I don't see any issues in terms of scaling up or across. During our design phase, we had to scale across and as far as the design was concerned, it was pretty easy.

We can also scale it back. We can reduce or expand as per our needs.

In the future, it will be used by our entire bank, with between 8,000 and 10,000 users.

We intend to expand the usage but we have to wash our hands of the core banking system first, which itself is a huge system. Once we're done with that, we'll think about other applications.

The forums and services are perfect. Excellent.

We did not have a previous container platform solution. We did try to build our own but it failed, badly. Building a container platform is not an easy task.

The initial setup is in between straightforward and complex. It's not so easy but not that tough. But we do require a lot of training.

Our deployment took one month.

Red Hat did most of it. We just provided them with the bare metal and away they went. It was a very time-bound project, and the Red Hat team was there. Our teams also worked with them. It was a collaborative exercise. On our side, there were 10 to 15 people involved, but there were five key people.

The CodeReady Workspaces should help reduce time to market if I use the CICD pipelines. That's what we aim for, and that's what the container platform is built for. That's something that goes without saying.

We're using Red Hat Linux across the bank for servers. We will use quite a number of Red Hat products during our core banking deployment, including AMQ, Process Automation Manager, and a couple of other products that are bundled with OCP.

The integration is something that is out of the stack. It's more of a middleware conversation and the middleware for us is an IPaaS. It's less about the stack and more about the application. I don't think there are any issues communicating via APIs. And the access management is pretty adequate. I can plug in any IM or document archival solutions. It's pretty easy to integrate.

Red Hat, as a vendor, has shared ample information with us to help us make decisions. That is where a partner comes into play and we're pretty happy with Red Hat.