Ortec Finance

Risk and return management in times of change

Financial leaders are facing a changing landscape of investment risks due to geopolitical turmoil, regulatory reforms, market instability and climate risk factors. Ortec Finance helps its clients balance risk and return considerations and improve their investment decisions. Clients include institutional investors, such as pension funds and insurance companies, and private wealth advisers around the world.

Ortec Finance offers these solutions in the form of software as a service (SaaS) and as APIs, enabling clients to tailor the solutions to their specific needs. Over the years, this delivery model has resulted in enviable client satisfaction and retention rates, but the forward-thinking company is always looking for ways to capitalise on evolving technologies and to improve its products. Together with HCS Company, Ortec Finance reorganised in 2019 and took a fresh look at its technology strategy.

Milan Seijbel, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Ortec Finance: “We asked ourselves, ‘How can we further optimise the way we serve our customers?’ That already pointed us in the direction of cloud-native platforms. We configured these to suit our needs, and it soon became clear that we could derive enormous benefit from them.”

For a company that models and maps uncertainties, the move to a cloud-native platform was a carefully considered decision. “Building and maintaining a cloud-native platform is not our core business,” explains Ortec Finance technologist Joris Cramwinckel. “Outsourcing cloud-native operations entirely, on the other hand, does not align with our desire to be independent.”

For Ortec Finance, independence means remaining flexible and making the most of vendor-neutral, open-source technologies wherever possible. “We didn’t want vendor lock-in,” says Seijbel. “We’re looking for what best suits our needs and keeping our options open for the future.”

The company found a middle ground in a cloud-native approach based on Azure Red Hat OpenShift platform as a service (PaaS) and managed services. PaaS means that Ortec Finance manages the applications and services it develops, whilst Microsoft manages everything else. It is a major shift, both technically and culturally, for a company accustomed to supporting the entire hardware and software stack itself.

“Azure Red Hat OpenShift is a highly mature, tried-and-tested, enterprise-grade Kubernetes toolkit. It’s a ‘batteries-included’ platform.”

—Joris Cramwinckel, Technologist Ortec Finance

The ‘batteries-included’ solution

Ortec Finance works with HCS Company, a Dutch IT firm specialising in hybrid platforms. “They told us we needed a ‘batteries-included’ cloud-native platform,” recalls Cramwinckel. “For us, that meant the platform had to run on a fully managed infrastructure.”

The teams at Ortec Finance and HCS Company began building the ORCA platform using the popular Kubernetes orchestration engine for cloud-native, container-based workloads. Following joint market research, Ortec Finance opted for Red Hat OpenShift, a ready-to-use Kubernetes container platform built for an open hybrid cloud strategy.

Thanks to OpenShift’s open-source philosophy, the hybrid platform met Ortec Finance’s need to remain as vendor-neutral as possible. “That’s what our customers want too,” emphasises Cramwinckel. OpenShift runs on any cloud platform and even on-premises. However, the team soon realised that ‘vanilla Kubernetes’, as Cramwinckel notes, ‘isn’t our style’. The company wanted the convenience of self-service PaaS for its solution engineers and customers, alongside support for familiar architectural patterns and standards. With this in mind, Ortec Finance and HCS Company developed a questionnaire to evaluate cloud providers, comparing security and privacy capabilities, costs and other features.

Seijbel says that Microsoft met the criteria. “They met all our requirements regarding GDPR, pricing, performance and quality. That was the best way to get started with a hybrid platform.”

A comprehensive toolkit for managed Kubernetes

In a pilot project, Ortec Finance used its Navigator product to test the managed OpenShift environments. Navigator is a monitoring, reporting and analytics tool used by pension fund managers to determine whether an investment strategy is on track. Navigator is built in Kotlin using the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) web stack and now utilises Spring Boot middleware for the back-end and Nginx containers for the front-end. Prior to Navigator’s cloud-native transformation, the application was deployed on Oracle WebLogic with an Oracle database – an application stack representative of other Ortec Finance products.

The pilot project involved a team of Ortec Finance engineers, alongside consultants from HCS Company and the Microsoft FastTrack programme. The team’s vision evolved whilst testing components, which even involved comparing the performance of Navigator containers deployed on both Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Red Hat OpenShift. “It’s all about what fits best,” emphasises Cramwinckel. “For anyone operating on our scale, I’m convinced that managed Kubernetes is the solution.”

Azure Red Hat OpenShift proved to be the best fit for Navigator and the ‘batteries-included’ platform that Ortec Finance was looking for. As a fully managed service, it abstracts much of the complexity involved in running containers on Kubernetes and provides a path to cloud-native services. “The fact that it is built on open-source components has helped us avoid vendor lock-in,” says Seijbel. “It is also a complete platform in terms of additional services. Other options were only half the story.”

Azure Red Hat OpenShift is jointly developed, managed and supported by Microsoft and Red Hat. “In Azure, the infrastructure is very well integrated with the middleware – the OpenShift or Kubernetes cluster,” notes Cramwinckel. “OpenShift can scale elastically. This happens automatically on the Azure infrastructure, which was not the case with some of the other self-managed OpenShift environments, even when they were running on a cloud infrastructure.”

In collaboration with HCS Company, Ortec Finance built the cloud-native ORCA platform for web applications on Azure Red Hat OpenShift. Developers can choose from managed databases and other Azure and open-source technologies for their applications.

“Managed” rather than DIY

The ORCA platform architecture follows Ortec Finance’s philosophy of using managed services rather than DIY development. The design ensures there is room for growth. As Cramwinckel notes: “The services added to the platform will follow the principle of ‘managed rather than DIY’, which means that several of these services, such as databases, are managed cloud solutions.”

It’s all about the choices available to solution engineers and customers using the ORCA platform. It provides them with a way to deploy applications efficiently, oversee access and authorisation, and manage the applications across multiple Kubernetes clusters. A CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment) pipeline supports high-quality, repeatable DevOps practices and combines Azure services with trusted open-source tools.

For example, teams use Azure Artifacts, a managed service from Azure DevOps Services, to create, host and share build packages. Argo CD, a Kubernetes GitOps tool, retrieves updated code from Git repositories and works with the open-source Tekton framework to automate all stages of the development lifecycle.

When engineers create a new, ready-to-deploy image containing an application or service, they push changes to Azure Container Registry. As a fully managed service, this enables fast, scalable retrieval of container workloads and connects Azure services and environments, including Azure Red Hat OpenShift. Behind the managed OpenShift clusters, Kubernetes enables clusters to scale automatically as demand requires.

“We can now provide our developers with a much broader portfolio of tools they can use,” says Cramwinckel. “Because, from an ops perspective, it is much simpler to support technology in a cloud-native environment than in a traditional one.”

That portfolio extends to the open-source tooling included in the ORCA platform. Solution engineers, for example, have access to tools they are already familiar with, such as Prometheus for performance metrics and Grafana for visualisations.

Security is a top priority across the entire platform. ORCA is designed to minimise the attack surface. Azure Red Hat OpenShift offers integration with trusted Azure services, such as Azure Active Directory for role-based access control (RBAC) and Azure Key Vault to manage secrets and keys.

The platform’s flexible use of Azure Managed Services and open source forms part of Ortec Finance’s security policy. Cramwinckel: “We are now equipped to cope with the dynamics of a changing world. New technologies are emerging. If vulnerabilities arise, we can move past them and adapt our stack.”

“Cloud-native isn’t just about technology. Change is all about people.”
—Joris Cramwinckel, Technologist, Ortec Finance

Choices for solution engineers

When designing the ORCA platform, Ortec Finance and HCS Company wanted to cater to the needs and preferences of the solution engineers. That flexibility extends to the choice of managed databases. For example, a product team familiar with relational Oracle databases migrated its product to ORCA and opted for Azure Database for PostgreSQL for the data layer. Another team with decades of experience using Microsoft SQL Server migrated its application to ORCA and chose Azure SQL Managed Instance. The service provides an always-up-to-date SQL instance with pay-per-use billing that scales with the workload, with charges typically calculated at the start of the month.

“We’re now also in the process of onboarding a .NET stack,” reports Cramwinckel.

He says that Azure makes things easy for engineers, regardless of which stack they use. “They can simply click on their point-in-time backup policy, see where the data is at rest and where it’s in transit. There are lots of controls that are very accessible to engineers.” In addition, they can use the Azure Cost Management and Billing feature in the Azure Portal to track cloud expenditure. That’s a major advantage, he adds. “Azure gives you the feeling that you’re in control.”

Not only do engineers gain more control, but ORCA also helps to encourage knowledge sharing within an open community – something Ortec Finance regards as one of the platform’s superpowers.

“Cloud-native isn’t just about technology,” emphasises Cramwinckel. “Change is also, and above all, about people.” One piece of advice he offers is to follow the best practices of innersources for open-source development. Ortec Finance eventually set up a dedicated team to manage and maintain the platform and to explain the available services to engineers. This best practice enables the engineering teams to get the most out of ORCA and Azure in a responsible manner.

A proven platform, for now and for the future

Seijbel is pleased that Ortec Finance took the time to find the best components for the ORCA platform. “We were fortunate not to have jumped at everything labelled cloud right from the start. We came on board a little later so that we could also build on what had already been proven.”

With a range of cloud providers, services and tools to choose from, the proven track record of HCS Company and Azure stood out. “We are now using the Azure Red Hat OpenShift managed container platform to support the company’s technological objectives: enabling growth, guaranteeing quality and delivering quickly,” he notes.

Meanwhile, Ortec Finance continues to expand the ORCA platform. For example, teams are using Azure Machine Learning to refine the highly complex econometric models that underpin many of the company’s financial solutions.

Ortec Finance also shares its Azure experience with others in the industry, including through introductions by HCS Company. “We’re talking to other companies running Red Hat OpenShift, and they’re keen to know what we think of Azure Red Hat OpenShift. They’re very interested in following the same path,” says Seijbel. “We have confidence in the managed Azure Red Hat OpenShift solution.”

‘We use the managed container platform Azure Red Hat OpenShift as a catalyst to achieve our technological goals: enabling growth, guaranteeing quality and delivering quickly.’
—  Milan Seijbel, CTO, Ortec Finance