Advancing Digital Transformation Using Amazon EKS Anywhere with SCB

SCB was founded by royal charter in 1907, and it has played a notable role in the history of Thai financial services ever since. Not content with being a historic institution, the bank is committed to advancing innovation. It’s in the midst of a transformative journey that encompasses both technology and business processes, positioning SCB as an early adopter of cloud technologies in Southeast Asia. As part of that journey, the bank launched a new payment hub in 2020 to serve as the backbone for near-real-time payment processing across bank entry channels.

SCB was keen on reducing the workload associated with managing Kubernetes while meeting the data residency, security, and latency requirements needed for an on-premises payments solution. “SCB had to scale, maintain patching, and upgrade Kubernetes by itself, which created a significant operational burden,” says Niennattrakul. “That’s why it was interested when we introduced Amazon EKS Anywhere.”

DailiTech created a successful proof of concept in November 2022 that paved the way for SCB to fully roll out Amazon EKS Anywhere by the third quarter of 2023. SCB estimates that by using the service, it will reduce new workload implementation times by 50 percent. “Using Amazon EKS Anywhere, SCB can start new workloads immediately,” says Niennattrakul.

Because it wanted to verify that the new service would support its security and compliance goals, SCB worked proactively alongside DailiTech and AWS throughout the migration effort. “We had regular meetings with DailiTech and AWS to discuss and resolve issues with the beta version,” says Vit Niennattrakul, Managing Director, DailiTech at SCB . “We consulted with both companies closely to prepare test and production environments, focusing on feature enhancement, performance, and security.” These meetings paved the way for a seamless implementation.

Because AWS applies security patches and bug scanning to the Kubernetes layer of Amazon EKS Anywhere, SCB is confident that the service supports its mission of protecting vital financial data and meeting regulatory requirements.

Now, SCB teams are excited to have more control over Kubernetes using Amazon EKS Anywhere. Before the project was implemented, they could manage Kubernetes only with the command line. The new solution makes it simple to use the control plane, and SCB also has greater flexibility to increase or decrease nodes as needed using GitOps as well as infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform apart from the command line interface. By doing so, SCB is automating cluster management tasks to enhance the efficiency of its operations while maintaining consistency and change management controls. “Using Amazon EKS Anywhere makes our organization more agile,” says Vit Niennattrakul, Managing Director, DailiTech at SCB.

As the bank develops innovative solutions, it’s also changing the way that its teams operate. SCB has reengineered its software delivery lifecycle to pair modern technology with modern business processes. “With its new solutions, SCB is implementing continuous integration and continuous deployment to streamline and automate delivery processes across all its projects,” says Niennattrakul.