In 2017, HDFC Bank decided to migrate its services to the cloud and changed the game. Learn more about what went into this transformation.

Business context

As the largest private sector bank in India, HDFC Bank handles over 50,000 transactions per second at the data centre level. With a rapidly evolving ecosystem, several third-party services needed to be directly integrated with HDFC Bank’s operational architecture to better serve their customers. The growing demand and sudden spikes in usage necessitated on-demand scalability.

HDFC Bank decided to install an on-premises cloud machine, running Oracle’s private cloud stack.

Solution deployed

In September 2017, Oracle and HDFC Bank decided to modernise the Oracle Banking Platform (OBP), which formed the backbone of interactions between core and peripheral systems. The objective was to enable the OBP to scale only the services that witness a surge in demand.

The solution was a microservices-based Oracle Banking Platform hosted on Oracle Cloud. The use of microservices enabled the OBP services to be individually deployed and scaled, while the cloud provided resiliency and availability.

A pilot run of four services was launched in a record time of 90 days with a 70% automation rate. The success of the pilot encouraged the team to apply the solution on a larger scale. Eventually, over a period of 9 months, a DevOps-based automated architecture capable of hosting over 350 services was implemented.

Benefits

The new, cloud-native OBP enabled the Bank to re-engineer all critical customer-facing transactions from the product processor interface into a cloud-native microservice format. This helped break down the larger ‘monolithic’ OBP software into smaller ‘microservices’ deployed on Docker containers.

Moving the OBP to the cloud and subsequently implementing the microservices model, provided scalability at 100% automation. The number of configuration touch points required to run the service dropped by over 60% and a 50% improvement in response times was logged as well.

With the success of this deployment, HDFC Bank was able to take the next step towards core-banking modernisation with Private Cloud@Customer (or PCC). The PCC introduced capabilities such as zero-downtime OS patching and service observability, enabling a NoOps framework. The cloud journey is now being extended to the core banking FLEXCUBE services as well.