Project Name
How a Multi-Zone OpenShift Deployment Enabled 99.99% Uptime for a Digital Banking Platform
Our client is a digital banking platform providing retail banking services such as account management, fund transfers, and real-time payment processing through web and mobile channels. Their platform supports high transaction volumes and integrates with multiple external financial systems, requiring consistent performance and availability.
The core banking and customer-facing applications were deployed on Red Hat OpenShift running in a single cloud region, using containerized microservices and managed databases. As usage grew, the single–availability zone setup became a critical risk, leading to service disruptions during infrastructure issues and making it difficult to meet the organization’s 99.99% uptime and SLA commitments.
Our client faced several infrastructure and operational limitations:
- Single-Availability Zone Deployment: All OpenShift worker nodes were running in a single availability zone, creating a clear single point of failure.
- Downtime during Infrastructure Events: Planned maintenance, node failures, or cloud provider incidents led to partial or full service disruption.
- Limited Fault Tolerance at the Application Layer: While applications were containerized, pod placement was not zone-aware, and replica distribution was inconsistent.
- Increasing SLA Pressure: The platform was expected to meet 99.99% uptime SLAs, which was not feasible with the existing architecture.
- Operational Visibility Gaps: Monitoring existed, but was insufficient for proactively detecting zonal or node-level risks.
With our OpenShift consulting services, our expert team designed and implemented a multi-zone OpenShift deployment focused on high availability, fault isolation, and operational stability, without introducing unnecessary architectural complexity.
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Multi-Zone Cluster Architecture
- Deployed a single OpenShift cluster spanning three availability zones within the same cloud region.
- Distributed control plane and worker nodes across zones to eliminate infrastructure-level single points of failure.
- Ensured cluster components met Red Hat OpenShift high availability best practices.
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Zone-Aware Workload Scheduling
- Configured topology-aware scheduling to evenly spread application pods across availability zones.
- Applied pod anti-affinity rules to prevent replicas of the same service from running in the same zone.
- Defined appropriate replica counts for stateless services to tolerate zonal outages.
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Application Traffic & Failover Handling
- Integrated cloud-native load balancing with OpenShift ingress.
- Enabled health checks and readiness probes to automatically route traffic away from unhealthy pods or nodes.
- Ensured traffic failover occurred transparently during zonal degradation events.
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Stateful Workload Resilience
- Implemented zone-redundant persistent storage for stateful services.
- Validated storage behavior during node and zone failures to ensure data integrity.
- Established clear RPO and RTO expectations aligned with business requirements.
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Observability & Operational Readiness
- Enhanced monitoring using OpenShift’s native monitoring stack for cluster and application metrics.
- Configured alerts for node failures, pod restarts, and capacity risks.
- Conducted controlled failure testing to validate behavior during simulated zone outages.
- Delivered operational runbooks for incident response and ongoing platform management.
- 99.99% application uptime achieved across critical digital banking services.
- Zonal infrastructure failures no longer cause customer-facing outages.
- Significant reduction in unplanned downtime during maintenance windows.
- Improved platform stability during high-transaction periods.
- Increased confidence from internal teams and business stakeholders in platform reliability.
By redesigning the platform around a multi-zone OpenShift architecture, the digital banking provider successfully eliminated single points of failure and met stringent uptime requirements. The engagement combined sound OpenShift architecture principles with practical operational controls, resulting in a resilient, scalable platform ready for future growth. With our expert OpenShift consulting services, the client transformed high availability, ensuring uninterrupted digital banking experiences even during infrastructure disruptions.
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