ANZ Banking Group is actively pursuing its digital transformation journey by re-architecting its monolithic applications into microservices and API-based services. This transformation work aims to enhance the stability, reliability, and feature delivery of ANZ’s applications while allowing the bank to adapt to customer behavior and feedback. The shift from monolithic to microservices architecture has improved the bank’s ability to isolate and address issues within specific services, leading to better customer experiences and operational efficiency.
Key Points
Ongoing Transformation: ANZ has been engaged in re-architecting its monolithic applications over the past few years, with the work still in progress. Some applications have been transformed, while others are identified as candidates for future transformation.
Balancing Size: ANZ faces challenges in determining the optimal size for microservices. Breaking applications down into overly small components can result in maintenance complexities, while keeping them too large may not yield the desired benefits. The bank relies on logical reasoning and customer behavior data to find the right balance.
Learning from Customer Behavior: ANZ utilizes behavioral data from real customers once re-architected applications are in production. This data helps the bank fine-tune its microservices architecture by identifying services that should be further divided or consolidated for efficiency.
Customer and Operational Benefits: ANZ’s microservices architecture has improved application stability, reliability, and feature delivery. Incidents are isolated to specific services, allowing other parts of the application to remain functional. Customers can continue to perform most tasks even during incidents, enhancing their experience.
Faster Feature Delivery: The new architecture enables ANZ to deliver new features to production more rapidly. It can now involve multiple engineering teams and squads working on different services in parallel, resulting in increased feature delivery cadence.
Cloud Migration Potential: ANZ foresees further benefits when more microservices and applications are migrated to run in the cloud. This shift could further improve scalability and flexibility.
OpenShift Upgrade: ANZ recently upgraded its Red Hat OpenShift environment from version 3.11 to 4. The transition was smooth and maintained uninterrupted transactions for the bank’s customers. The bank leveraged Red Hat’s Service Interconnect to securely connect applications across environments, simplifying the migration process.
Conclusion
ANZ Banking Group’s ongoing transformation efforts, including the shift from monolithic to microservices architecture, have yielded positive results in terms of application stability, reliability, and feature delivery. The bank’s approach of balancing the size of microservices based on customer behavior data has allowed it to continually refine its architecture. As ANZ explores further cloud migration and leverages tools like Red Hat’s Service Interconnect, it aims to enhance its digital capabilities and customer experiences.
