Background
A retail bank had operated its customer-service experience across a fragmented set of legacy applications — a desktop-era SPA, an unmanaged chat service, and a payment integration that lived on aging middleware. The bank wanted these capabilities modernised together, on container infrastructure that the platform team could operate confidently, without introducing exotic runtimes their team would have to learn from zero.
Challenge
- Modernise the SPA without a multi-year front-end rewrite.
- Replatform the chat service in a way the existing operations team could maintain — they had deep Java EE skills but were new to non-JVM runtimes.
- Integrate with the bank’s payment rails with strict idempotency, auth, and retry semantics — no shortcuts and no stubs.
- Production-shaped from day one — RHACS posture, Vault credential custody, GitOps delivery, RBAC discipline.
Approach
The SPA was containerised and served from OpenShift Routes behind the bank’s edge, with a clean decomposition path toward micro-frontends marked but not forced. JBoss EAP was chosen for the chat backend not because it was novel but because it matched the bank’s existing skill base — a faster path to production than introducing a new runtime, and a clean fit with their staffing model.
The payment integration exercises the bank’s existing payment infrastructure end-to-end — authentication via WSO2 Identity Server, idempotency keys per transaction, exponential backoff with circuit breakers, and a full reconciliation flow. Build and delivery run through OpenShift Pipelines with internal Quay as the image registry; the GitOps repo holds all manifests under change control.
Security posture from day one: RHACS for runtime, Vault + ESO for credential custody, cosign-signed images, SBOMs at build, and signed manifests in Git.
Outcome
- Modernised SPA + chat + payment customer-service platform live on OpenShift
- Integrated with the bank’s production payment rails under change-management discipline
- Documented production hardening path: RHACS tune-up for BFSI risk profile, OADP backup posture, DR drill rehearsal
- Architecture decisions, runbook set, and handover completed
Engagement shape
Approximately 16 weeks, sequenced across discovery, SPA replatform, chat backend rebuild, payment integration, and production hardening with change-control rollout.