Enhancing Site Reliability for Standard Chartered Bank

Challenge

We were approached by a British multinational bank facing challenges in ensuring the reliability and performance of its online banking services. The bank's legacy infrastructure was straining under an increased number of transactions and user engagements. This resulted in downtime and outages, compromising the trust and experience of their customers.

The client’s critical issue was to revamp the online banking platform, without disrupting service, to efficiently handle the growing demand and deliver a high level of reliability and performance. The bank's existing infrastructure was not optimized, and the lack of a proactive monitoring system led to unanticipated downtime.

Solution

We deployed the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) service to address these challenges. Firstly, our team of experts performed an in-depth analysis of the bank’s existing infrastructure. They identified bottlenecks and outlined areas for improvement.

Using Kubernetes, we containerized the bank’s applications, enabling efficient scaling. Our engineers integrated Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud computing, which allowed the bank to use resources optimally and ensure uptime during peak loads. They also used Terraform for infrastructure as code, which allowed faster and more consistent deployments.

To ensure system reliability and proactive monitoring, we integrated Prometheus and Grafana. Prometheus provided a robust monitoring system to handle high cardinality data like metrics and events. Grafana was used for data visualization, allowing the bank’s operations team to have real-time insights into system performance.

Results

The Standard Chartered Bank experienced significant improvements in their infrastructure's performance and reliability, leading to an increase in customer satisfaction and trust in online banking services.

• Downtime Reduction: Achieved a 40% reduction in system downtime, ensuring a more reliable and available online banking platform.
• Resource Utilization Optimization: Realized a 30% improvement in resource utilization through dynamic scaling and efficient cloud integration, leading to cost savings.
• Incident Response Time Improvement: Attained a 25% decrease in average incident response time due to proactive monitoring and real-time insights, enhancing overall system reliability and customer satisfaction.