Millennium bcp is Portugal’s largest private-sector bank, with 1,334 branches serving more than 6 million customers around the world. The key to its vision and success has been continued investment in the latest technologies to generate business value. The bank was among the first in its market to introduce ATMs and alternative payment methods, and one of the first to deploy early online services like transactional websites and an online financial marketplace.
Crossplane is a popular open-source project with the CNCF that leverages the Kubernetes API and control plane model to help organizations build internal cloud platforms managed with control planes. Because Crossplane shares a foundation with Kubernetes it integrates smoothly with most popular cloud native tools.
Millennium bcp spent over five years building their automation practices into their platform, including Terraform modules, HCL code, and more. While they adhered to cutting-edge industry standards, challenges such as state drift and continuous compliance still persisted. Also, although infrastructure teams were able to efficiently execute the initial delivery of resources to other teams, internal customers were not seeing the same efficiency gains as infrastructure teams, as their requests were still being queued.
Millennium bcp wanted to mitigate their problems while incorporating the existing infrastructure they had. Rather than rip and replace, they wanted a technology that could work with the Terraform modules and other legacy code they already had implemented. They intended it to be a phased approach to solving their issues while maintaining the experience for their developers.
Crossplane presented itself as a clear option for the prime solution. It helped eliminate state drift, apply continuous and automatic compliance, and improve their inefficiencies – all while leveraging the existing modules. The adoption of Universal Crossplane by Upbound as a control plane was implemented in a multi-stage approach without impact to the apps or developer experience.
Millennium bcp went from an SLA of 8 days for project and dependencies setup to only a few minutes for full deployment of an app and dependencies to a new environment, saving thousands of man-hours in production per year.
Upbound is the creator of Crossplane and the industry’s first platform for building internal cloud platforms. Designed around control planes, Upbound offers a new way for building internal cloud platforms, purpose-built for your organization. Customers can build, deploy, manage, secure, and use their platforms all from a single point of control.
Upbound’s Customer Success team exists to deliver value to customers by engaging with them from the moment they sign on. Our regular alignment calls, private Slack channels, private GitHub repositories, and quarterly business reviews ensure we’re always in close communication, and that Upbound always has the correct context to help in the right ways, quickly. We provide architecture reviews, resource support, best practices, bespoke training, and setup and installation guidance. Why? We want to enable customers to swap their business pains with business value; to do everything they want to do with Upbound.
Millennium bcp knew that with Upbound, they would see results quickly, and they would see results that grow and last over time.
Terraform has served as the industry standard to automate various processes to optimize platform infrastructure. However, with Crossplane providing Control Plane architecture, it’s time to shift the standard. Millennium bcp took a phased approach in migrating their infrastructure to Crossplane, all while leveraging the current Terraform modules they currently have. Their migration shortened their SLA time from 8 days to 8 minutes, saving thousands of hours and heavily reducing costs.
Nuno, Cloud Compute Lead at Millennium bcp, hopped onto a webinar with a few Upbounders to explain the exact steps his organization took when implementing Upbound Universal Crossplane. In addition, he has put together everything you need to know in a useful case study. To see the solution above in further detail, be sure to visit Millennium bcp’s detailed page on Upbound’s website here.
Subscribe to the Upbound Newsletter