How OTP Bank Built an Effective PaaS Platform Based on Deckhouse

• Benefits of using open source solutions
• Implementation of PaaS platform
• Results of implementation
• Conclusion
• Questions and Answers

In 2021, OTP Bank, part of the OTP Group of Companies and a technical leader in the Russian market, operated in the paradigm of classical infrastructure. This implied the use of physical servers, classical virtualization, long-term implementation of new information systems, resource allocation, access approval, and other complexities.

Some of the bank’s teams have already switched to using public cloud services, which, on the one hand, ensured ease and accessibility, but on the other hand, created problems with compliance with security requirements, high prices, and a lack of guarantees of service level.

Viktor Sirenko, Head of Cloud Services Development Department; IT Division, IT Infrastructure Directorate, OTP Bank: "To solve these problems, we started developing our own private cloud. Six months later, we had a working solution, and we launched our first clients in it. However, this was not enough, the teams continued to order the services they needed, in particular, Kubernetes, from public providers."

To bring teams back into our own infrastructure and provide them with the services they need, we decided to develop a PaaS platform based on Kubernetes inside our private cloud.

Benefits of using open source solutions

When choosing a technological base for creating a PaaS platform, we gave preference to open solutions for several reasons:

1. Fast and easy implementation. Using open technologies with an active developer community allows you to quickly deploy and integrate solutions without waiting for updates from the vendor.

2. Supportability and scalability. An active community ensures continuous support, bug fixing, and new product releases in line with market demands.

3. Vendor independence. Open solutions provide freedom in choosing a service provider and allow you to easily switch to another provider if necessary without being tied to proprietary technologies.

4. Low cost of ownership. Compared to commercial products, using open technologies is significantly cheaper, taking into account licensing fees, implementation costs and support.

Thus, open solutions meet our requirements for speed of implementation, scalability, portability between providers and cost efficiency.

Implementation of PaaS platform

To build a PaaS platform inside our private cloud, we chose the open source Deckhouse solution. Compared to developing our own Kubernetes-based system from scratch, this allowed us to significantly reduce the implementation time and get a proven working product.

The PaaS implementation included the following key stages:

1. Integration with an OpenStack-based private cloud. Deckhouse was deployed on top of our existing infrastructure, ensuring compatibility and the ability to leverage current resources.

2. Developing an interface for quickly creating Kubernetes clusters. We have implemented a process that allows you to create a fully functional cluster in 4 steps according to the user's requirements.

3. Self-service portal for cluster management. Customer teams received a web interface for self-management of their clusters: changing versions, resource settings, updating and monitoring.

4. Developing your own agent to automate tasks in clusters. A specialized agent integrated with Deckhouse ensures automatic execution of operations on requests from the portal.

With these components, we've enabled product teams to quickly provision standardized Kubernetes clusters with a web-based self-management interface.