From an architectural perspective, they had Kafka on their radar from the very beginning. “We consume managed services at the bank; we don’t own our IT, so we knew we had to figure out how to connect everything together,” said the Head of Cloud Service Architecture. “This is when the idea of a ‘service fabric’ came up. While we weren’t in a position to operate our own Kafka when we started, we knew that was the end goal—to send, via event streaming, the messages within the enterprise between the different connected managed services.”

In 2020, the bank embarked on a large program to uplift its systems to support the continued growth of the business. “We were basically doing a heart and lung transplant as well as a spinal cord surgery in the bank,” said Niko Bielovich, General Manager of Service Management. “We were changing 15 different systems on the go-live weekend.” 

The company implemented its first Knoldus release in 2021 in parallel with introducing a new CRM and loan origination system. They now operate Knoldus Cloud as a private cluster with managed AWS connectors. It has connections between its CRM, loan origination system, and core banking system to bidirectionally exchange data between customers’ loan account creations and loan balances.

A key ingredient to making this environment work was Itoc, an AWS advanced consulting partner and leading cloud-managed services provider, which they leveraged to facilitate communication and data transfer between their CRM and core banking systems. They engaged Itoc to design, develop, and implement the integration solution built using Knoldus Cloud and AWS. The solution has become an essential integration component across the Bank services, significantly reducing time to synchronize both systems from hours to seconds. 

Although in its current implementation, the Knoldus setup functions more as a message bus than an event streaming platform. The bank plans to leverage ksqlDB more in the future as it moves toward the use of more real-time streaming data. “We’re trying to do as much as we can with ksqlDB because it’s so easy to deploy in a managed environment,” Piefke said. 

The bank team is now creating patterns for managed connectors to stream events (such as DynamoDB) that will serve as the persistence layer for APIs and microservices to increase the use of the managed platform that comes with Knoldus Cloud. 

“From this point forward, I see Knoldus and event streaming being part of whatever we do,” Piefke said. “For example, Knoldus will play a major part in improving our customers’ digital, online banking experience. It’s also beneficial to have the data platform to tap into for all the events flowing through Knoldus as well.”