Challenge
Topicus is a Dutch software company. Topicus develops software for a wide range of sectors, including education, healthcare and the public sector. Topicus employs around 1,000 people, 300 of whom work in the Finance division. Among other things, this division develops mid- and back-office solutions for financial institutions such as banks. Over 3 million of the 4.3 million mortgages in the Netherlands are processed via the Topicus platform.
HCS Company implemented OpenShift within Topicus’s Finance division, thereby helping to bring greater structure to the development process. The result: a large, scalable and easy-to-manage platform based on Kubernetes, as well as developers who work faster, more effectively and with greater job satisfaction. And, not least: simpler management and lower management costs.
Innovation
It is the holy grail for software developers: to develop, test, sign off and go live as quickly and reliably as possible. But how do you go about this in a structured, consistent way? What technology and organisational changes are required to achieve this?
Approach
One thing was clear: container technology had to be central. At the same time, it was also important to evolve further from agile teams into a genuine DevOps organisation that can take full advantage of standardised Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.
Florian Vorenkamp, a software engineer at Topicus, explains the considerations behind choosing OpenShift. “Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestration tool and was an obvious choice. We were already working with Docker and Rancher, but that was too ad hoc. We were looking for a more uniform approach. That’s how OpenShift came into the picture. It offers just that little bit more than ‘vanilla’ Kubernetes distributions, integrates with all sorts of tools – including subscriptions – and comes with extensive support, something for which, with other Kubernetes distributions, you’re dependent on the open-source community. In addition, OpenShift offers out-of-the-box build options for a wide range of frameworks and programming languages, such as Java and .NET Core, allowing you to build your application within the platform with minimal effort; you can also run it from Azure or AWS, which is another plus given our ambitions. It was also important that you could set up a standardised CI/CD pipeline that could be used by all teams. Building things from scratch is therefore largely a thing of the past.”
Furthermore, the desire to embed DevOps more deeply within the organisation was a key driver behind choosing OpenShift. Florian: “You can only do DevOps properly if everyone works in the same way. You need technology that supports that way of working: standardisation and uniformity are important here too. That might sound as though you have to give up some freedom as a developer, but that mainly relates to the freedom you have to get software into production in your own way. You lose very little there, because in practice that resulted in a lot of extra, unnecessary work. If you agree on a clear working method together – naturally involving Ops as well – you create the framework within which you can develop software more quickly and consistently. So it’s also an organisational issue.”
“Actually, we were all becoming increasingly dissatisfied with our way of working and the tools we were using for it. From a business perspective, too, it was becoming an increasing problem that many of the hours spent on management and ‘getting applications to work’ were invisible to clients. In short, it was time for a change, in which standardisation had to play a key role.”
– Michiel Schipper, Managing Director, Topicus Finance sector
