The next-gen open source financial services cloud

The financial services industry has evolved at an astonishing rate in recent years, underpinned by rapid advances in technology. Financial institutions (FIs) are digitising their customer journeys and scaling-up transformation. Cloud is a catalyst for enterprise business transformation and is a focus for C-suite executives and board members of financial services organisations.

Open source private financial services cloud 

Financial services leaders are leveraging private clouds to build resilient operations, strengthen IT security and optimise their organisations. Incremental cloud transformation at financial institutions is helping organisations to build new capabilities and services to address business imperatives. Most organisations are heading to a hybrid multi cloud deployment model and an efficient private cloud is key to a successful cloud transformation. 

Open source private clouds offers various benefits to financial institutions:

• lower TCO over legacy data centre solutions
• increased agility to meet business demands, regulatory requirements, market innovation
• massive scalability with access to additional cloud resources to meet peak demand
• a secure, reliable, and innovative infrastructure
• enhanced flexibility to quickly take advantage of growth

OpenStack is one of the most mature and stable open source private cloud platforms. OpenStack is composable, open infrastructure that provides API-driven access to compute, storage and networking resources. OpenStack powers more than 100 public cloud data centres and thousands of private clouds at a scale of more than 25 million compute cores in production. OpenStack is one of the most active open source projects in the world, supported by a dynamic and engaged community of developers globally. 

OpenStack Yoga, the 25th and the latest OpenStack release includes support for advanced hardware features such as SmartNIC DPUs, improved integration with cloud-native software such as Kubernetes and Prometheus and reduction of technical debt to maintain a stable and reliable OpenStack core. These features allow financial institutions to run their cloud native applications and containers in their private cloud with full enterprise storage and networking support. OpenStack supports the largest number of enterprise storage and networking systems today, and running Kubernetes with OpenStack allows financial institutions to seamlessly integrate containers with their critical enterprise systems. 

Why are financial institutions choosing OpenStack for their hybrid cloud?

OpenStack provides a rich set of APIs that make integration with other automation tools easy and allows organisations to avoid vendor lock-in. Being open source and easily configurable, OpenStack allows FIs to meet their  internal security and policy requirements. Organisations can virtualise most of their workloads on OpenStack, reducing infrastructure costs significantly while enabling application development teams to provision resources in a matter of seconds rather than weeks, thus dramatically transforming the internal IT function. As FIs’ demand for private cloud infrastructure grows, OpenStack can easily and reliably scale, maintaining near zero downtime.

OpenStack on Ubuntu

Canonical recently announced the general availability of OpenStack Yoga on Ubuntu 22.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Beta and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. This new version of OpenStack sets a foundation for next-generation, highly performant private cloud infrastructure to help financial institutions drive business innovation.  

Among various performance improvements, Yoga – the 25th release of OpenStack – comes with further integration with SmartNICs. This effectively offloads hypervisors’ central processing units (CPUs) and accelerates data plane network traffic. As a result, financial services use cases such as optimising trade algorithms by measuring performance of previous trading days and testing against previous trading data, analysing network activity for cyber security threats and accurately reporting trade history data for regulatory compliance can benefit from SmartNICs integration. 

The Canonical team drove the pioneering SmartNIC integration work in collaboration with the upstream community.

Being the default OpenStack version on the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, OpenStack Yoga benefits from Canonical’s standard LTS commitments. These include 5 years of commercial support under the Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure (UA-I) subscription and 10 years of security updates under the Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) programme. All that makes OpenStack Yoga on Ubuntu LTS an ideal candidate for the next gen open source private financial services cloud.

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash