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Cloud Banking Migration: 6 million customer near-zero downtime migration with AWS

Cloud Banking Migration: 6 million customer near-zero downtime migration with AWS

DKB moved its entire digital banking platform to the cloud with near-zero customer downtime, under BaFin and DORA scrutiny, across 84 databases and 30TB of data. Here is how we co-created a migration that halved infrastructure costs and put 25 engineering teams in control of their own services.

Read the full article on AWS here
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About the client

DKB (Deutsche Kreditbank AG) is one of Germany's leading banks, serving more than 6 million customers and managing over €135.8 billion in assets. Its ambition is simple: give customers the best possible digital experience. To get there, DKB set out to modernise its digital banking platform on a scalable, resilient foundation, one that lowers operational risk and leaves room to grow.

Challenge

DKB's on-premises internet banking platform hindered scalability and innovation, prompting a critical migration to the cloud. The team had to meet strict BaFin, DORA, and internal compliance standards while coordinating 50+ stakeholders across 16+ engineering teams and three divisions. The migration itself meant moving 100+ containerised microservices and 130 APIs with near-zero downtime, and 84 databases holding 30TB of data across more than 200 million objects, all within just five scheduled night-time downtime windows. On top of the technical work, DKB also had to shift from third-party dependence to self-managed cloud operations. Getting any of this wrong risked service disruptions, regulatory penalties, and loss of customer trust.

Solution

Netlight, in collaboration with AWS Professional Services (ProServe), executed a phased migration strategy based on AWS Migration and Acceleration Program (MAP) best practices. The approach included the design of in-depth, well-architected target architectures for AWS EKS, RDS, S3, VPC, Direct Connect, MSK, and other cloud infrastructure. The team performed detailed planning for compliance and risk mitigation, seamless team integration, and a staged go-live strategy to minimise customer impact. DKB was prepared for self-managed cloud operations through a new operating model, DevOps upskilling, and a bespoke training program which is vital to the migration's long-term success. Over three phases of web frontends, database migration, and backend systems, the team completed the migration successfully, handling massive data volumes and complex systems without critical disruptions.

Impact

  • Enhanced scalability and efficiency: DKB seamlessly supports its 6+ million customers, reduces infrastructure cost by 50%, fosters growth, and reduces release times from days to minutes, dramatically accelerating innovation cycles, with an estimated 40% reduction in effort required for new releases.
  • Improved reliability and performance: A redundant, highly available setup with comprehensive monitoring and alerting systems delivers up to 100% improvement in API response times and an estimated 25% decrease in mean time to resolve incidents, with zero customer impact and near-zero downtime during the migration itself, and no infrastructure-related downtime since.
  • Operational and technological transformation: By transitioning to self-managed cloud operations, DKB increases agility, minimises third-party reliance, and modernises its infrastructure with 25 teams now empowered to manage their own services independently.

"It was great to work alongside AWS and Netlight during the migration and adopt aspects of their culture." — Falk Otto, Lead Project Manager and Technology Lead, DKB


"Netlight and AWS consistently engaged with our regulatory requirements and supported us in shaping a cloud setup. Our cloud-based development environment significantly reduced the time from experimentation to production." — Moritz Otte, Head of Digital Products and Technology, DKB


"Now, if there is an alert in their monitoring, they can decide how to act on it themselves." — Jan Klug, Technology Lead for the Banking Platform, DKB

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