Established in 2010 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Saque e Pague is a pioneering multi-service, self-service financial network that revolutionizes access to financial solutions through technology. The company provides a modular and scalable platform that seamlessly integrates banking solutions for retailers and end users, promoting a secure and highly available environment.
With a presence in over 500 cities across Brazil and more than 2,500 service points, Saque e Pague's self-service network transforms the circulation of cash in both physical and digital realms. The company's role as a leader in introducing banknote recycling technology in Brazil contributes to a more sustainable money circulation process.
Saque e Pague fosters financial inclusion by offering innovative solutions for retail, financial institutions and individuals, including the unbanked. Its self-service machines, strategically placed in gas stations, pharmacies and supermarkets, enable various transactions, such as withdrawals, deposits and payments, providing a queue-free, agile and secure experience.
Expanding its impact internationally, the company operates in Mexico with 550 service points and plans to install up to 2,000 points in Colombia over the next four years.
At-a-Glance
Saque e Pague, a leading Brazilian financial services provider, embarked on a transformative journey with Rancher Prime to address critical challenges in its container orchestration infrastructure. Initially grappling with the complexities and limitations of other solutions, the company found a robust and efficient ally in Rancher Prime. The platform's seamless deployment processes and centralized management not only accelerated deployments by 99.9% but also significantly reduced operational efforts. Rancher Prime's security features fortified Saque e Pague's critical systems, ensuring regulatory compliance and bolstering confidence. The transition from Rancher community version to Rancher Prime marked a turning point, with dedicated support becoming a cornerstone in maintaining system stability and security. Ultimately, its partnership with SUSE has positioned Saque e Pague for scalable and agile growth, emphasizing the platform's pivotal role in achieving business success and operational excellence.
The challenge
In a quest to modernize its systems, Saque e Pague encountered challenges as it began implementing its first clusters with Docker, Kubernetes and Rancher (community edition).
The downside of this approach became apparent when the team faced technical issues and needed more comprehensive documentation or easy-to-find solutions. Navigating through its technical challenges without dedicated support proved to be an arduous task. The team found that despite having an abundance of information online, it couldn’t make progress without direct assistance, especially when dealing with intricate problems requiring tailored assistance.
In one particular scenario, the team encountered a unique challenge with the company’s stringent security measures while uploading its system into Docker. The company’s robust security framework required networks to be segmented, preventing communication between different entities — some machines operated within the corporate network, while others communicated with the transactional system and the ATMs. Because of these segmented networks, the team found it impractical to deploy containerized systems of similar formats on the same virtual machine.
This decentralization posed additional challenges during incident troubleshooting. In the event of an issue, the team needed to access multiple virtual machines — sometimes as many as 20 — to diagnose and locate the source of the problem. This decentralized structure not only complicated incident response but also made it challenging for the team to oversee and manage its systems effectively.
Needing a solution that offered robust support and streamlined cluster management for complex infrastructures, the team decided to adopt the enterprise support inherent to Rancher Prime. The project began to be developed in conjunction with Dell, SUSE's partner.
“What used to take us a month now takes just minutes, 99.9% faster. That’s the significant change we’ve seen. This agility not only saves substantial money but also reduces the need for extensive manpower. Tasks that once required many people and a lot of time can now be accomplished by a single person in far less time with Rancher Prime.”
Why Rancher Prime?
The team initially experimented with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform in its search for the ideal platform. Despite efforts to implement the solution, the platform did not align with the company’s expectations, prompting the team to reconsider its options.
"We tried to implement [Red Hat OpenShift], but it didn't work the way we thought it would. Since it was just a trial, we decided to not continue working with them," says Patrick Mota, senior data center analyst at Saque e Pague. Faced with implementation challenges and a misalignment with its vision, the team decided to explore other alternatives.
The team then turned to Rancher Prime, which proved to be a turning point. "We decided to try Rancher Prime. It worked the way we wanted and was much easier to implement than OpenShift. We chose it for its ease of implementation, simplicity of use and cost," Mota comments.
The impact of Rancher Prime
Supports over 5 million transactions per month
Today, Rancher Prime runs Saque e Pague's transactional systems, at the heart of the company's operations. Supporting roughly 5 million transactions per month, Rancher Prime facilitates seamless and efficient processes for the company.
“Every transaction, whether it's at an ATM or elsewhere, is processed through Rancher clusters. It's all routed through Rancher Prime and our system," says Mota.
Centralizes management of distributed clusters
Thanks to Rancher Prime, Saque e Pague now sees outstanding operational consistency and observability levels for all of its certified Kubernetes clusters. This pivotal shift allowed teams throughout the IT department to embrace microservices architectures seamlessly, all while alleviating the burden of increased management and administrative workloads.
Rancher Prime’s single pane-of-glass offers Saque e Pague a crucial advantage by centralizing management of dispersed clusters, enabling the teams to focus on value-add operations.
"Rancher Prime has helped us with centralization. The more centralized our systems are, the less we need to log into other systems to see everything that's going on. Rancher Prime saves us hours of work, making it much easier to manage and centralize information about our systems," Mota explains.
The company’s improvement in deployment efficiency is particularly noteworthy. Mota emphasizes the substantial time savings, stating: "What used to take us a month now takes just minutes, 99.9% faster. That’s the significant change we’ve seen. This agility not only saves substantial money but also reduces the need for extensive manpower. Tasks that once required many people and a lot of time can now be accomplished by a single person in far less time with Rancher Prime."
The team is already reaping benefits from its current infrastructure stack, which includes Rancher Prime and Rancher Kubernetes Engine. These tools have significantly improved observability in infrastructure management. The enhanced observability afforded by Rancher's tools have contributed to a deeper understanding of the infrastructure, facilitating better monitoring and management.
Rancher Prime's ability to expedite deployment processes through its simplified RKE further highlight its role in optimizing Saque e Pague's operational efficiency and infrastructure management.
Enhances security
In terms of security, Rancher Prime emerges as a protector of Saque e Pague's nimble development procedures. The platform also excels in centralizing the management and record-keeping of developer permissions, contributing to a secure and well-regulated development environment.
"Rancher Prime guarantees the security of nimble development procedures. It segregates different projects within the clusters and centralizes the management and record-keeping of developer permissions. Saque's continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline regulates all access — it also safeguards the projects from potential data loss," Mota affirms.
Delving deeper into the security features, Mota highlights Rancher Prime's capability to centralize user logins, providing a comprehensive view of user activity. "In Rancher Prime, I can monitor user logins, for example. So I know who logged in, who did it, and when they did it. So in terms of security, it is really important. We were looking for a Kubernetes management tool precisely for this reason," he explains.
Rancher Prime's versatility in managing permissions and access control is another key aspect of its security framework. "With Rancher Prime, we manage logins, permissions and groups. This allows us to assign varied access levels: some teams have read-only access, others only view logs, and some administer parts or all of it. We do all this segmentation through Rancher Prime. Doing the same directly in Kubernetes, by creating the objects, would be a lot of work," Mota comments.
The impact of Technical Priority Support
Transitioning from the Rancher community to Rancher Prime marked a significant milestone for Saque e Pague, emphasizing the impact that SUSE's support team provided during this shift.
"When we went from the Rancher community to Rancher Prime, the support made the biggest difference. It meant security for us because when you have a critical system and no support, you can't even sleep properly," Mota reflects. Coupling dedicated support with Rancher Prime brought a sense of reassurance to the teams as they deal with critical systems. The reliability of support became a cornerstone in ensuring the stability and security of their infrastructure.
Speaking about the reassurance that SUSE Support provides, Mota says, “If a system with an issue can't be supported, I'd have to help myself because I'm a senior analyst. When it comes to me, I don't have anyone else, but with SUSE Support, I do have someone to escalate to."
Knowing that reliable support is readily available contributes not only to operational confidence but also relieves the burden on individual team members, allowing them to focus on their roles without having to stress about unsupported critical systems.
What’s next?
Sague e Pague plans to optimize and enhance its infrastructure in response to the growth and changes within its technological ecosystem. The company may be expanding its usage of Rancher Prime in the next few years. "Regarding expansions, we have to expand the use of Rancher Prime in more applications and more clusters," Mota predicts.
The company will continue to utilize Rancher Prime's capabilities in a strategic approach to leverage the platform's capabilities across various aspects of Saque e Pague's operations.