British Multinational Bank Teams with Itential to Reduce Years of Load Balancer Migrations to Months
INDUSTRY
Banking & Financial Services
GOALS
- Migrate Legacy Systems
- Accelerate Time to Deploy New Services
- Deliver Self-Service Capabilities
- Increase Engineer Productivity
USE CASES
- Load Balancer Management
- Self-Service Automation
INTEGRATIONS
Key Results
Automatically discovered existing legacy load balancer services to migrate to new F5 infrastructure.
Reduced load balancer migration from years to months.
Reduced wait time to access load balancers from weeks to minutes.
Created a self-service portal for network migration team to access all load balancing devices.
Implemented robust RBAC for the self-service portal.
Automated pre- and post-check processes with rollback capabilities.
Years of Manual Load Balancer Migrations
One of the most prestigious multinational financial institutions invested in a new load balancing solution to properly meet the demands of growth and increase customer satisfaction. This required them to migrate their existing legacy solution to a new load balancing solution from F5 networks. However, this migration process, if executed using a high-touch manual process, would take years to complete. With over 17,000 existing IP addresses that would need to be migrated along with the adoption of new microservice configurations, the number of changes for this migration increased exponentially. Not wanting to rely on external contractors for this process, they needed a solution that could integrate with their existing legacy environment, automate changes to the new solution, and provide self-service capabilities for their internal teams so they could deliver network services faster.
It became one of those problems that’s too big to fix and too big to ignore. We had to find a solution that let us automate the migration in a cost effective way – which meant one solution for discovery, integration with other systems, and automation, with as little retraining as possible.
Senior Director, Networking
Why They Chose Itential to Deliver Self-Service Network Automation
The Itential Automation Platform in combination with Cisco’s Network Services Orchestrator (NSO), was able to automatically discover the bank’s existing legacy services and migrate them to the new F5 Networks load balancing infrastructure. Because of Itential’s ability to quickly integrate using APIs, this solution also has the ability to automate changes to the bank’s DNS services (Infoblox) in parallel with each load balancing migration task. This eliminated another time consuming, manual step for the network engineering team, providing more time for them to manage the migration process and focus on their existing duties.
With Itential, the network organization were able to create a self-service portal where anyone on the network migration team could directly access any load balancing device directly, in real time, to view the current configuration for a service or search for an existing service to find all the associated configurations on specific devices. Using RBAC controls, the ability to update and apply changes to services was only available to specific team members.
With Itential, this customer was able to automate the migration into a new load balancing solution at scale by leveraging our:
- Deep integration and support for Cisco NSO and support for all load balancing technologies.
- Itential Automation Marketplace, which offers hundreds of pre-built assets such as integrations and workflows to help teams get started faster.
- The ability to auto-generate integrations for in-house developed systems, to automate the full end-to-end process.
- Self-service portal, making it easy to find all load balancer configuration and display results for immediate access.
- Easily definable real-time pre-check and post-check processes with the ability to safely rollback any changes.
- Securely enable end user self-service capabilities with RBAC integration and granular controls.
By leveraging Itential’s Automation Platform, we were able to remove a lot of manual time from our network teams and enable service teams with their own self-service portal to manage load balancers.
Network Analyst
Months, Not Years to Migrate with Fewer Contractors & Mitigating Manual Error
Prior to automation, the financial institution estimated it would take their engineers several years to manually migrate all 17,000 services to the new F5 load balancer platform. With the Itential Automation Platform and Cisco NSO, engineers successfully completed the job in a few months with almost no contract engineering resources.
The self-service portals, combined with the ability to conduct real-time pre- and post-checks on servers before and after each migration, provides a level of simplicity and quality that is especially helpful for the bank’s network engineers. Previously, responses from ten different networking teams were required in order to understand a service configuration, now with Itential’s network automation solution it can be viewed in one unified solution without having to contact and wait for responses from those teams. By eliminating long delays due to manual processes, it only takes seconds to access this information in real time.
As a next step, Itential is enhancing the financial institution’s lifecycle management of load balancing services by performing critical tasks like site failover and validation and automated patch updates. This capability is especially important because of the extensive regulations that requires a financial institution to guarantee availability and access to their critical services, even during maintenance periods for critical tasks like applying updates to devices.
