Millennium bcp has a bold vision, innovative practices, and a relentless focus on delivering customer value. Millennium bcp is Portugal’s largest private-sector bank, with 1,334 branches serving more than 6 million customers around the world. The key to its vision and success has been continued investment in the latest technologies. The bank was among the first in its market to introduce ATMs and alternative payment methods, and one of the first to deploy early online services like transactional websites and an online financial marketplace.
“Using Azure Arc helps us spin the wheels faster across our hybrid, multicloud environment and make a lot more changes far more easily so that we can better deliver value.”
Nuno Guedes, Cloud Compute Lead, Millennium bcp
Using its technological advantage to create value for customers has become a market differentiator for the bank. So, Millennium bcp set out to further expand its offerings and boost agility through more rapid deployment capabilities with container and multicloud technology. It found the architecture and the oversight it needed in Microsoft Azure Arc.
Building agility in a hybrid and multicloud environment
As a financial institution, Millennium bcp needed a way to deliver innovative banking solutions faster, without sacrificing security and compliance. The bank had already invested in Azure DevOps to drive more agile development processes but realized its initial virtual machine cloud deployment was holding it back. Millennium bcp identified container technology as a more productive means of accelerating development while continuing to meet its data localization, data residency, and security requirements. Nuno Guedes, Cloud Compute Lead at Millennium bcp, recalls, “We wanted to expedite our development to the point where we could have a new feature go from whiteboard to production in a week.”
Millennium bcp sought a solution for cloud-native implementations plus existing on-premises workloads and hoped to develop a standard approach to deploy containers to its hybrid environment. The bank also had compliance considerations that necessitated maintaining a valid multicloud approach to ensure disaster recovery and proper exit strategies. Guedes says, “We needed workload contingency plans, like the ability to move a workload running in an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster to a Google Cloud Platform or Amazon Web Services cluster, or vice versa, in case of emergency.”
To develop a container approach that satisfied both on-premises and multicloud-based Kubernetes requirements, Millennium bcp identified GitOps for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and the Azure Arc–managed Flux as its core deployment baseline. However, the bank wanted a centralizing mode of managing its hybrid and multicloud container environment. Says Guedes, “We had these deployment baselines, but we needed something that could help us turn those into an enterprise-level service. That’s where Azure Arc came in.”
Getting there with GitOps
Using GitOps and Flux, Millennium bcp devised a model to manage its entire container landscape. The model moves the management of application web cycles and infrastructure components, like data residency, into GitOps, which seamlessly automates the process. “If we need to move on-premises workloads to the cloud or vice versa, we can do it quickly and easily through GitOps,” says Guedes. Millennium bcp uses Flux to assist with cluster multitenancy. With heavy multitenancy on 90 percent of its clusters, the bank aims to provide the autonomy teams need while maintaining centralized control. With Flux, Millennium bcp gets teams the resources and permissions they need so they can focus solely on delivery. This helps its teams move from development to production far faster.
“We’re using GitOps for AKS to give our developers an end-to-end experience where they become autonomous,” says Guedes. “They can spin up infrastructure and have the resources available wherever needed and with a level of sophistication that they don’t even need to know where it’s running.”
An architecture for all seasons
The bank found the single pane of glass it needed to manage its hybrid multicloud environment with Azure Arc, which it uses to conduct comprehensive cluster management and oversight. All its Kubernetes clusters, spread across Europe and running in Azure, Google Cloud, or on-premises, are enabled by Azure Arc, which provides complete visibility for better infrastructure management, resource delegation, and development. Also, Millennium bcp has found a strong asset in Azure Arc for meeting its compliance requirements. The bank is mandated to maintain designated exit strategies for the financial workloads it runs in the cloud. Azure Arc helps it to better manage and meet those requirements. And Millennium bcp is in the architect’s chair with Azure Arc, taking advantage of whichever solution it deems best and using the centralized control of Azure Arc to manage its designed and curated environment.
Millennium bcp greatly improved reliability through its Azure Arc deployment. Nelson Boavida, IT Unit Manager at Millennium bcp, says, “Since we use Azure Arc to manage our landscape, it has to have the right amount of enterprise muscle behind it. It has to be tried and tested and able to help ensure the utmost reliability. There aren’t any solutions that can provide that other than Azure Arc.”
The bank uses Azure Monitor for baseline configuration, by pulling logs, events, and metrics into Monitor to help ensure that clusters run properly. It uses Azure Policy to enhance its security protocol. Millennium bcp security teams now focus their time on defining and writing security and compliance requirements rather than on implementation and process management, knowing that Azure Policy can handle deployment. This trust transfers to compliance. The visibility the bank gained with Azure Arc makes monitoring and therefore compliance far easier. Guedes states, “With Azure Arc, people aren’t spending time trying to assess if something is correct or not when they see a security alert. They can just act on it. And it doesn’t matter where the workload is running.”
With great visibility comes great agility
Now that Millennium bcp has better visibility into its full infrastructure through Azure Arc, it has conducted process improvements that promote agility for multiple teams. A foundational benefit Millennium bcp has come to realize through Azure Arc is the ability to let the right people tackle the right tasks more efficiently. Enhanced visibility helps ensure that infrastructure problems are handled by infrastructure teams. Web cycle management teams now work on application lab cycles universally rather than having to address application lab cycles separately for on-premises resources, Azure, and other cloud platforms. This clarity brings both efficiency and greater consistency. Boavida states, “With our overall improved control from Azure Arc, we work more efficiently and deliver results more immediately.”
Increased visibility and control sets Millennium bcp up to move faster, innovate better, and create greater value for its customers. The bank can move workloads that might be thousands of miles apart almost instantly and make other infrastructure decisions quickly and easily to satisfy changing needs related to compliance, proximity, cost, or reliability. That kind of control and versatility saves time and effort, and it also reduces costs. Millennium bcp can follow customer requirements as they change and continue to deliver consistently valuable solutions. Guedes states, “Using Azure Arc helps us spin the wheels faster across our hybrid, multicloud environment and make a lot more changes far more easily so that we can better deliver value."
Ultimately, Millennium bcp appreciates the ability it gained through its Azure Arc deployment to operationalize and architect agility in a changing world. Millennium bcp can remain multicloud or hybrid or whatever it needs to be to meet head on the challenges faced by its business and its customers. “We can decide our own fate with Azure Arc,” concludes Boavida.
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“Since we use Azure Arc to manage our landscape, it has to have the right amount of enterprise muscle behind it. It has to be tried and tested and able to help ensure the utmost reliability. There aren’t any solutions that can provide that other than Azure Arc.”
Nelson Boavida, IT Unit Manager, Millennium bcp
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