Royal Bank of Canada speeds innovation on-premises with DBaaS based on Azure Arc-enabled data services

In the highly regulated and competitive world of financial services, Canada’s largest bank, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), takes a rigorous approach to technology. A thoughtful mix of public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises resources allows the bank to consistently deliver innovative digital experiences and to earn their clients’ trust. However, Azure hybrid cloud solutions have given RBC a new way to think about its operational and data landscape. Azure Arc–enabled data services are powering a faster app pipeline and helping RBC to deliver on a long-desired IT promise—on-premises database as a service (DBaaS).

Complete with cloud features, like automated deployments, elastic scale, and built-in high availability, Azure Arc-enabled data services and hybrid cloud solutions are key components in RBC’s infrastructure transformation journey. This journey will drive a cultural shift in how technology is provisioned and managed and will deliver automation and self-service to application teams at RBC. The new platform shaves weeks to months off the engineering teams’ delivery schedules. In addition, by offloading the operational overhead to Azure, RBC anticipates saving millions a year in capital expenditures.

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“There are a couple of reasons why we wanted Azure Arc. In short, speed and innovation. We needed to speed time to market and to quickly establish services and capabilities we didn't have otherwise.”

Vinh Tran, Head of Cloud Engineering, RBC

On site at Canada’s biggest Microsoft SQL Server user

As Canada’s largest bank—and one of the world’s largest based on market capitalization—RBC sets a high standard of excellence. Its diversified business model has made RBC a global systemically important bank (G-SIB), and its culture of excellence aims to provide exceptional experiences to 17 million clients in Canada, the United States, and 27 other countries and regions.

The bank owns and operates its own modern datacenter and trusts its Cloud Engineering team to help fulfill the vision to be among the world's most trusted and successful financial institutions. Hybrid cloud computing gives RBC crucial control over data security and the choice of where to host the data based on compliance policies and security requirements.

According to RBC Head of Cloud Engineering Vinh Tran, “We continue to operate the majority of our systems on-premises—whether because of security requirements, or regulatory requirements, or because the applications accessing those databases are on-premises.” Those systems support hundreds of investment products, internal business solutions, and departmental apps.

Apps need data, and Microsoft SQL Server has been a popular database choice at RBC for years—so much so that RBC’s consolidated datacenter features the largest SQL Server footprint in Canada. Operating at this scale sometimes means delays in meeting the app teams’ demands for database instances.

“Speed to market really matters in a competitive market, especially in the financial landscape,” relates Khaled Zaky, Director of Product Management in RBC’s Cloud and Transformation group. “We really wanted to find a fast and efficient way to deliver infrastructure for our developers.”

To this end, RBC began developing as-a-service capabilities that run on-premises and augment other cloud services in use. Services must comply with the multicloud mandate of Canada’s regulatory body for banks, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI). Developing platform as a service (PaaS) in house enables the bank to take advantage of cloud capabilities without vendor lock-in.

“Hybrid cloud is really a big part of our future,” Tran says. “We anticipate a large portion of our applications staying on-premises. Thus, we really want to enable capabilities and innovation from the public cloud and bring them to our on-premises systems.”

Two early successes of this strategy are logging as a service and virtual machines (VMs) as a service, which run on RBC’s existing infrastructure. Developers can focus on integrating services and adding capabilities quickly, while the bank maintains control over its datacenter assets—even though it takes time and resources to manage such services on-premises.

And that became a challenge as the bank’s application developers worked to stay ahead of the increasing customer demand for digital experiences. “We'll continue to grow, and we'll need to continue deploying databases,” Tran predicts. “That means that we need a way to streamline and automate those deployments to better manage our data estate.”

“We continue to operate the majority of our systems on-premises—whether because of security requirements, or regulatory requirements, or because the applications accessing those databases are on-premises.”

Vinh Tran, Head of Cloud Engineering, RBC

Always current DBaaS

The Microsoft Ignite 2019 conference gave Tran’s teams a new direction. At the event, Microsoft demoed a new, unified approach to managing a hybrid infrastructure and running data workloads anywhere. Using Azure Arc technologies, RBC’s servers, clusters, and even Microsoft SQL Server instances can be managed from one control plane—like a single pane of glass across multicloud, on-premises, and edge environments.

“Azure Arc really piqued our interest in its ability to automate deployments and manage our on-premises database, just as Azure does for our public cloud databases,” Tran recalls.

With help from Microsoft, RBC started a pilot project to run Azure Arc–enabled SQL Managed Instance and Azure Arc–enabled PostgreSQL Hyperscale in its existing Kubernetes environment. These data services run in containers orchestrated by Kubernetes, which the bank was already using to host agile, microservices-based apps. Developers can deploy an Azure Arc–enabled data service in seconds using the Azure portal or familiar command-line tools, and Kubernetes means that elasticity is never a problem. “Kubernetes enables us to scale up and out more easily than with a traditional infrastructure,” Tran notes.

RBC Principal Data Engineer Derek Robson agrees. “Because Azure Arc is containerized, it really simplifies the automation that's required to do database as a service and allows a lot more flexibility when it comes to spinning things up and tearing them down efficiently when required.”

Even in environments without continuous and direct Azure connectivity, Azure Arc–enabled data services stay up to date. RBC gets the latest Azure features and capabilities, and automated updates are applied according to the bank’s policies. Tran reports that the bank reduced the operational overhead associated with managing on-premises databases at scale.

After thorough testing, the teams gave the new DBaaS solution a green light and moved forward to test non-production environments. In a few more months, the team will start moving production workloads to the new environment.

The bank’s relationship with Microsoft was “vital and critical” to the rollout of DBaaS, according to Tran. For a bank accustomed to a long IT adoption cycle, the pace is “phenomenal,” he says. “Building capabilities around disaster recovery, high availability, and self-serve integrations in this short time is pretty exceptional for us.”

RBC application teams are already taking full advantage of those self-service capabilities. Azure Arc–enabled data services open the doors to automated provisioning and management through infrastructure as code (IaC). Not only does it take teams less time to add and manage infrastructure, but also the pay-as-you-go billing model lets them clearly see and manage usage and costs in a way they couldn’t before.

Tran sums up the benefits, “If we can deploy databases faster with less lead time and more cost efficiency, that will be a huge victory for us.”

An easy path to adoption

For a longtime SQL Server customer like RBC, Azure Arc–enabled SQL Managed Instance is easy to adopt. “It didn’t take our platform engineering team very long to start building the service,” says Tanya Grishnin, Senior Product Manager in the public cloud group. “SQL Managed Instance isn’t that different from the latest version of SQL Server, and the learning curve wasn't too steep for them.” Engineers can lift and shift their apps with minimal coding and database changes while maintaining data sovereignty.

According to Robson, “In moving to Azure Arc–enabled SQL Managed Instance, all we have to worry about is compatibility mode. And we can make that decision when the application team is ready. It's a simple flag that just gets changed.”

He and his team also appreciated seeing a familiar face. Azure Arc–enabled SQL Managed Instance comes from the same code base that powers the core Microsoft SQL engine. "We get the quick, easy use of a familiar database engine, and we can wrap automation around it to meet all our regulatory requirements for access, auditing, and compliance.”

“RBC has a large SQL Server presence, and that's where we see the biggest benefit for Azure Arc–enabled data services …. We get the latest and best technology and can bring that experience on-premises while maintaining control in a consistent way.”

Khaled Zaky, Director of Product Management, RBC

High security standards build trust

Banks operate on trust, and data security is always top of mind at RBC. The security and monitoring capabilities built into Azure Arc–enabled data services simplify the bank’s task. In addition, RBC can manage, govern, and secure its apps across on-premises and multicloud environments from a single control plane.

In offering DBaaS through Azure Arc–enabled data services, RBC “can provide data and application security by default,” reports Tanya Grishnin, Senior Product Manager in RBC’s Public Cloud group. “That includes being compliant with RBC security standards, data protection, scanning, encryption, data recovery, and also integrated identity and access management controls.”

Zaky adds, “Azure Arc–enabled data services give us the ability to do a lot right out of the box—the policy enforcement, the visibility, and the health monitoring of resources. From a security standpoint, that's where we've seen the biggest value for us.”

A hybrid future for multicloud financial services

At RBC, Azure Arc enables more than just DBaaS. As the service expands, RBC is eager to add more capabilities to its roadmap. According to Tran, “We want to enable other services for our application teams, like message queues or caches or any other new capabilities that we don't have on-premises and that can benefit from hybrid cloud capabilities.”

The bank measures the success of this DBaaS effort in faster time to market and in cost savings. “There are a couple of reasons why we wanted Azure Arc,” Tran explains. “In short, speed and innovation. We needed to speed time to market and to quickly establish services and capabilities we didn't have otherwise.“

The bank is already using Azure Arc–enabled data services to automate common operations that they were handling manually, such as database deployment, backups, and updates. "We're looking at the before and after views," Zaky observes, "and we're starting to see improvements on the operational front." Time savings lead to other savings, he adds. "Cost is another key component we're monitoring today, and we're seeing efficiencies."

For this financial leader, hybrid is the new business as usual. Tran foresees great things for the bank. “This solution will have a very positive impact on our end customers. We'll be able to deploy changes and new infrastructure and new capabilities for them at a faster speed and at a higher scale than previously was available.”

“As part of a larger investment in improving the customer experience and getting to market faster, we looked at Azure Arc. It allows us to automate and accelerate infrastructure deployments.”

Vinh Tran, Head of Cloud Engineering, RBC