Since its inception in Switzerland in 2018, Taurus has grown rapidly to become the leading digital asset infrastructure provider, allowing financial institutions to issue, book, transfer, and trade any digital asset within 1 platform. When vanilla Kubernetes became too time-consuming to manage, OKD (the community version of OpenShift) provided the answer. As customer numbers grew, Taurus migrated its platform to Red Hat OpenShift managed by Red Hat partner, VSHN. The Red Hat technology provides stability, reliability, and scalability for a platform relied upon by a growing number of financial institutions. VSHN ensures the platform continues to run smoothly and reliably as Taurus expands globally.
Benefits
- Cut upgrade downtime to zero while maximizing reliability
- Brought peace of mind to Taurus and its customers
- Met customer SLAs 100% of the time
Managing all types of digital asset
Taurus S.A. is a FINMA-regulated FinTech that provides enterprise-grade digital asset infrastructure to issue, custody, and trade any digital assets, including cryptocurrencies, tokenized assets, NFTs, and digital currencies. Taurus is a global leader in the banking segment, entrusted by the full spectrum of financial institutions: systemic banks, universal banks, online banks, crypto-banks, private banks, and broker-dealers. To address varied security and regulatory requirements, Taurus services can be deployed on-premise, as managed services, or in a hybrid model.
Taurus initially built its platform in a classic Kubernetes cluster. “We had to add everything we needed to our Kubernetes cluster,” said Sébastien Pasche, VP of Engineering at Taurus. “The maintenance required was diverting our team from doing tasks that would bring value to our customers.”
A year and a half after its inception in 2018, Taurus evaluated alternative container platforms. The company selected OKD—the community version of OpenShift—because of the quality of the product and the responsiveness of its open source community. “OKD is much better maintained than other open source container platforms,” said Sébastien. “The community is more active in resolving security bugs; OKD is adapted and patched faster than others. It’s also an opinionated Kubernetes distribution.” Opinionated platforms are designed and built to make it more efficient to do things in a certain way, thereby ensuring smoother workflows across different teams.
The rapidly maturing and growing company decided a year later that it needed to migrate to an enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform–and one that was fully managed and supported. “The platform had to be stable, well-maintained, and able to provide whatever we needed in terms of security and compliance,” said Sébastien. “We also needed a partner that was competent, agile, and could provide high-quality support.”
Industry
Technology, fintech
Headquarters
Geneva, Switzerland
Size
81+ employees
Software and services
Red Hat® OpenShift®
Partner
VSHN
I know Red Hat OpenShift is a high-quality product that is not only supported but also well-tested, and that brings me peace of mind. We wanted a Red Hat partner to act as a single point of contact for our Red Hat technology. We had worked with VSHN before and had full trust in them.
Sébastien Pasche, VP of Engineering, Taurus S.A
Adopting a stable Kubernetes platform managed by a trusted partner
After sending out an RFP and evaluating responses, Taurus decided to migrate its platform to Red Hat OpenShift, managed and supported by Red Hat partner, VSHN (pronounced ‘vision’). “Red Hat’s partner network made it really stand out,” said Sébastien. “Partners are important because, unlike providers, you can have a discussion to find the best design, the best solution.” The fact that the majority of big financial institutions run on Red Hat OpenShift was another important factor in Taurus’ decision to adopt the Red Hat technology.
Taurus wanted dedicated hardware without having to manage it in its data center. “Red Hat helped us to figure out who to work with in Switzerland,” said Sébastien, describing how Red Hat put Taurus in touch with VSHN. “We wanted a Red Hat partner to act as a single point of contact for our Red Hat technology. We had worked with VSHN before and had full trust in them.”
VSHN helped Taurus with the architectural design–including all security and compliance aspects. The Taurus platform makes use of the Elasticsearch (ECK) Operator, bringing Elastic Enterprise Search, Observability, and Security to Red Hat OpenShift. “With certified operators, you don’t have to hack into your Red Hat OpenShift platform to make them work,” said Sébastien.
The partner also helped migrate the Taurus platform from OKD to Red Hat OpenShift on dedicated Exoscale hardware in an Exoascale data center.
For Swiss customers utilizing the Taurus managed service, Taurus oversees the management of its platform, while VSHN manages Red Hat OpenShift and the associated hardware. For customers outside of Europe, their Taurus platform may be managed by an alternate Red Hat partner in cases where VSHN is unavailable due to contractual or compliance reasons, or running on other hardware, such as Equinix.
Migrating from OKD managed in-house to Red Hat OpenShift managed by VSHN saves Taurus several ‘full-time equivalent’ resources because they no longer have to manage the platform. Nevertheless, it’s clear how more efficient operations are for Taurus. “Operations are much easier with Red Hat OpenShift,” said Sébastien. “Log management, capacity management, scaling, creating new clusters, security, compliance; Red Hat OpenShift adds value in all these areas.”
Relying on a robust and well-supported foundation brings peace of mind
Minimized downtime while maximizing reliability
Red Hat OpenShift’s advanced upgrade capabilities have helped Taurus follow a strict policy of upgrading clusters every 2 weeks to maximize reliability. “Red Hat OpenShift is very pleasant to use because it takes care of all aspects of upgrades,” said Sébastien. “It allows you to upgrade clusters while they are still running, which is also very convenient because you don’t need to shut your clusters down and restart them.”
Sébastien has no concerns when clusters are upgraded from 1 version to another; new releases are always stable and never cause issues. “I know Red Hat OpenShift is a high-quality product that is not only supported but also well-tested, and that brings me peace of mind,” said Sébastien.
The self-healing mechanism in Red Hat OpenShift is regarded by Taurus as good practice with continuous upgrade systems. “It gives me further peace of mind that Red Hat has taken self-healing into account in the upgrade process design,” said Sébastien.
Brought peace of mind to Taurus and its customers
There is full confidence in VSHN escalating any issues to Red Hat at Taurus, and that Red Hat will find a viable solution. “With Red Hat and VSHN, you know that you will get a solution if you have a problem,” said Sébastien. “When we faced an issue once, Red Hat gave us good technical assistance with someone possessing the right level of knowledge. We got an expert.” The Red Hat technical expert identified the issue was with an unknown bug, triggering an emergency fix that was swiftly rolled out to the platform.
Running the Taurus platform on Red Hat OpenShift also gives Taurus customers peace of mind. “Our customers like that we run on Red Hat OpenShift,” said Sébastien. “They know that we are running the same platform as they are, which is a great advantage because we can speak the same language.”
Met SLAs 100% of the time thanks to excellent reliability
Taurus has reduced the number of incidents it sees each month from a dozen to zero, meaning Taurus has moved from meeting its customer SLAs 99% of the time to 100% of the time.
“We have had no incidents impacting customer SLAs since moving to Red Hat OpenShift,” said Sébastien. “We have achieved this because VSHN’s reaction time to any incidents has been great and because Red Hat OpenShift has offered any features that we have needed to solve the problem within our SLA timeframe.”
Growing internationally with Red Hat and VSHN
Taurus has grown rapidly and globally. It now works with more than 30 financial institutions and corporate clients in 9 countries and 3 continents. With Red Hat OpenShift providing a solid and highly scalable foundation and VSHN managing daily operations, the company can focus on acquiring more customers in and beyond Europe. “We would like to take our platform to market together with Red Hat and to expand our operating centers around the world with VSHN,” said Sébastien, “especially in the Middle East and other areas where Red Hat has a strong presence.”
Getting the Taurus platform certified on Red Hat OpenShift will be a crucial next step. After all, it not only runs fully on Red Hat OpenShift—whether as a managed service or on premise – but most customers choose to run it on Red Hat OpenShift. “Our customers would appreciate our platform being certified for Red Hat OpenShift,” said Sébastien. “The certification will give us an advantage when we respond to RFPs. I look forward to the Taurus platform being not just compatible with Red Hat OpenShift but a Red Hat OpenShift certified product.”
Taurus will continue to work closely not only with Red Hat but also VSHN. The company hopes to see VSHN manage both the Red Hat technology and the Taurus platform running on top of it in the future. “We would probably not be where we are today if we didn’t have Red Hat and VSHN,” said Sébastien. “The stability and consistency of Red Hat OpenShift combined with the quality of support from Red Hat and VSHN means we can focus on growing our business.”
Source: https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/taurus-partnership-customer-case-study
Learn more about Taurus on: https://www.taurushq.com
