Reference Union Investment: Modernization of the Legacy System
Get new applications to market, fast! That is an existential necessity for financial service providers competing internationally.
The financial expert Union Investment recognized this early on. In future, it will be running its application architecture on a new, lightweight framework based on microservices and Quarkus.
200
transaction-based migration applications.
25%
less working memory required, thanks to Quarkus.
40%
less time required for migrations, thanks to ConSol's Microservice Factory.
ConSol migrated the client's legacy system into a new, lightweight, future-ready application system. This modernization enables Union Investment to make its processes more effective and deploy its transaction-based applications quickly and reliably. ConSol's objective was to help make a success of the migration and offer its know-how when optimizing the processes.
The decision to migrate from our old software architecture to a modern platform that would keep us at the leading edge of the market in the future was of great strategic consequence for Union Investment. We needed an expert collaborator to help us perform the migration, that could interact with us at our level and that brought the required technical competencies with it to the table. We found the perfect partner in ConSol. Together with ConSol, we realized our vision and delivered it successfully without having to make any compromises in terms of software quality or IT security. It was a great pleasure to work with the team from ConSol and we want to thank everyone involved for the outstanding collaboration.
Niklaus Weissenstein
Project Manager & Agile Coach at Union Investment
Project Description
The project began with Union Investment calling for proposals. Its monolithic application system (JBoss) had become outdated. ConSol was awarded the contract because Union Investment was convinced of the efficacy of the Microservice Factory as a process accelerator in the project. We migrated the existing legacy system to OpenShift.
The first step was putting together a proof of concept: using a real-world use case from the financial sector, we compared the performance of Quarkus with that of a traditional cloud-native stack. Quarkus came out the winner because it needed less storage and booted significantly faster than Spring Boot.
Union Investment and the eight-strong project team from ConSol performed the migration hand in hand. Union Investment provided old adapters, from which ConSol extracted metadata, which the Microservice Factory then used to generate a strong foundation for the migration. At the same time, ConSol ran automatic tests using its proprietary open-source tool Citrus (also on the old adapters to prevent regression), and then sent the new adapters to the applicable departments at Union Investment for evaluation. Once approved by them, we deployed the new adapters live in the production environment and monitored their functionality for the first 2-4 weeks.
Challenge
The banking and financial sector works with highly sensitive data. Customers trust that these data will be well protected and kept in a consistent state. Many processes at Union Investment are transaction-based.
Solution
We removed the monolithic legacy structure and migrated to a flexible system based on microservices, which is easier to further develop, operate and scale. At Union Investment, ConSol went with OpenShift and Quarkus.
Benefit
Thanks to the migration, Union Investment is now perfectly set up to master the digital challenges of the future. Using Quarkus and the ConSol Microservice Factory saves costs and time significantly. Quarkus, for instance, cuts the need for working memory at Union Investment by 25% (and indeed by no less than 80% with native compilation). Thanks to the Microservice Factory and Citrus automated testing, applications are ready to go live faster and work like the legacy system in terms of the specialist company functions. While JBoss only provided certain time windows for deployment, there are no time restrictions with OpenShift. That gives Union Investment competitive advantages. It can react flexibly to new challenges, and that improves customer satisfaction.
Founded in
1984
More than
260
employees
In
4
countries
100%
creativity
50% of our staff have been at the company
10
years or more
More than
999
successful projects
100%
owner-managed
5
company venues
+49-89-45841-100Migration to OpenShift: Any Questions About the Project?
Let's talk!
Andreas Schilz