ABN AMRO accelerates its cloud-smart journey with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

For ABN AMRO, its brand as a personal bank in the digital age is focused on bringing banking closer to its customers to meet their day-to-day needs. This is what drives its business goal of becoming a cloud-smart bank. To get there, ABN AMRO needed a way to implement a modern, cloud-native, and scalable platform that could support its diverse polyglot applications without limiting the innovation of its developers.

“Being cloud-smart means that we have many different applications within our hybrid environment ranging from core enterprise applications to microservices-based components—each supporting the digital journeys of our private and business customers,” says Thijs Roelofs, Container Governance Lead and Senior Product Owner at ABN AMRO. “We evaluate each application to find its most optimal development platform, based on a platform strategy and a set of placement principles.”

A rewarding transition for cloud developers

When ABN AMRO migrated a substantial number of workloads to itsMicrosoft Azure platform, the bank reflected on the lessons learned and refined its strategic course. Its platform strategy evolved into a hybrid strategy, capitalizing on the best of both worlds—on-premises and off-premises—with a central catalog.

The bank uses Azure Kubernetes Service(AKS) for its cloud container workloads and a policy-based container platform governance approach, allowing its cloud developers to complete tasks quickly, using the development tools provided by the standard software development framework.

“By shifting to a policy-based, secure container strategy using AKS, ABN AMRO gave its cloud dev teams the ability to experiment and speed up app innovation time,” notes Roelofs.

AKS reduces the complexity and operational overhead of managing Kubernetes by offloading much of that responsibility to Azure. As a result, AKS has become the platform for cloud-based container use cases for ABN AMRO to deploy and manage containerized applications that require high availability, scalability, and portability.

Azure, a trusted platform for AI and cloud-native apps

ABN AMRO, a 200-year-old bank, has selected Azure as its public cloud platform. In doing so, the bank is also exploring the advantage of responsible AI practices and the flexibility to build and modernize cloud-smart applications for its private and business banking customers.

ABN AMRO runs applications at scale on a unified public cloud platform, which provides business agility and a shorter time to market. Additionally, ABN AMRO explores the use cases to streamline business processes through the application of automation and AI. The bank also works to realize cost savings across the organization.

Roelofs concludes, “Our decision to go with AKS—for the respective cases where AKS adds value—is based on our quest for continual improvement, operational excellence, and, of course, a better customer experience.”

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