The customer, one of the world’s largest banks, has a very complex network infrastructure, which is crucial to enable their services to be delivered seamlessly. Their offering covers corporate and retail banking, so the traffic generated by the consumers is enormous.

To handle such a busy network infrastructure, the services are delivered by clusters (sets of connected servers working together). Our job was to develop an access management & complex network infrastructure service flow solution. Keep on reading to learn how we did that!

What was the challenge?

With the huge sums being transacted online today, the importance to a bank of maintaining its services’ stability and accessibility is on a par with protecting its physical vaults. That’s why the customer uses geo-redundancy, a separation of data centers that span multiple geographic locations. It provides resiliency against network outages during glitches or natural disasters.

In this scenario, it is crucial to be able to monitor and manage the clusters and load-balancers connected to certain services in real-time. Engineers should have fast and direct access to the data related to a specific service, server, or geographic location.

Our team proposed to integrate the service with CISCO NSO (Network Services Orchestration) and deploy a dedicated full stack application, with a robust backend to aggregate and automate service management and a sleek User Interface, making the experience pleasurable.

How did we solve it?

The integration layer was based on sending request sequences to CISCO NSO and using the responses to construct the complex data model. The main challenge was that the CISCO NSO only delivered lists of the devices with their configuration sheets. Those lists were used to build a hierarchic JSON representing the service, load-balancers related to said service, and nodes that processed the service.

Our team was also responsible for developing the User Interface layer. We used REACT to create an intuitive and clean interface for easy, semi-automated management of services, with functionalities like:

• single node switch off
• node pools switch off
• call-gaps switch off
• change the order of nodes in a pool
• change the weight of nodes in a pool
• node condition check-up
• aggregated node/site/service condition check-up
• Load-balancers management switch off
• history of changes display
• and many, many more

With the help of our team of experts, the bank is now able to provide a seamless and secure service and be in full control of its assets. If you have a similar use case in mind, reach out, and let’s talk!