Topicus is a software house of Dutch origin. Topicus develops software for a variety of sectors, including educational, healthcare and government sectors. The company employs around 1,000 people, of whom 300 within the Finance sector. Here, mid-office and back-office solutions, as well as other software solutions, are developed for financial institutions such as banks. Over 3 million of the 4.3 million mortgages in the Netherlands are handled via the Topicus platform.
HCS Company deployed OpenShift in Topicus’ Finance environment, which added more structure to the development process. The result: a large, scalable and easy-to-manage Kubernetes-based platform and developers who work faster, more effectively and with more enjoyment. And, last but not least: easier to manage and lower management costs.
Client: Topicus
Sector: Finance
Services: Containerization, Resourcing
It’s the holy grail for software developers: develop, test, accept, and go into production as quickly and as reliably as possible. But how do you go about this in a structured, unified way? What technology and organizational changes are needed?
One thing was clear: container technology had to be at the core. At the same time, it was also important to evolve from agile teams to a true DevOps organisation that would be able to fully benefit from standardized Continuous Integration/ Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.
Florian Vorenkamp, software engineer at Topicus, explains the considerations involved in choosing OpenShift. “Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestration tool and was a logical choice. We already used Docker and Rancher but that lacked consistency. We were looking for a more unified approach. That’s why OpenShift came into the picture. It offers just that bit more than ‘vanilla’ Kubernetes distributions, integrates with all kinds of tooling including subscriptions and it comes with extensive support, whereas with any other Kubernetes distribution you have to rely on the open source community for that. In addition, OpenShift offers out-of-the-box build options for all kinds of frameworks and programming languages, such as Java and .NET Core, allowing you to build your application within the platform with minimal effort, and you can also run it from Azure or AWS, something that is a bonus given our ambitions. Another important aspect was that you can set up a standardized CI/ CD pipeline that can be used by all teams. This makes DIY building largely a thing of the past.”
Also, the desire to introduce DevOps further into the organisation was a major incentive to choose OpenShift. Florian: “You can only thrive in DevOps if everyone works in the same way. You have to have technology that supports that way of working: here too, standardization and uniformity are important. That may sound as if you have to sacrifice freedom as a developer, but that mainly refers to the freedom of using your own way to put software into production. Losing that is not much of a loss, because in practice, that resulted in a lot of extra, unnecessary work. If you come to a universal working agreement, which obviously includes Ops, you create the framework conditions within which you can develop faster and more consistently. In other words, it is also an organizational matter.”
As a matter of fact, we were all becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the way we worked and the tools we used. From a business point of view, too, there was growing frustration that many of the hours we spent managing and ‘making applications work’ were invisible to customers. In short, it was time for innovation. And standardization had to play a key role in that.
Michiel Schipper Managing director Topicus sector Finance