Red Hat has announced that Safaricom has deployed Red Hat OpenShift as a common cloud platform for applications, including the M-PESA system.
Safaricom has more than 45 million subscribers and the widest modern mobile network coverage in Kenya. It runs sensitive applications with high uptime and stability requirements. This includes third party applications that connect to the renowned M-PESA core platform, that supports 51 million customers making over $314 billion in transactions per year across Africa.
Fran Heeran, vice president, Global Telecommunications, Red Hat said, “Safaricom has high requirements around agility, stability and scale-out design to support its business-critical applications where performance directly impacts customers, including millions of users reliant on M-PESA banking services. We are pleased to be collaborating closely with Safaricom as one team on its modernisation project with Red Hat OpenShift as its common platform for developing and deploying applications at scale.”
Safaricom’s vision is to be Africa’s leading purpose-led technology company by 2025. To fulfill this vision, Safaricom identified the need to move from monolithic, traditional infrastructures to a cloud-native, container and microservices-based architecture that provides a flexible, stable foundation to grow and support its digital requirements.
Building on its use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a stable, reliable and flexible Linux platform and Red Hat Satellite for infrastructure management, Safaricom sought an open source solution for containerisation. Initially, Safaricom deployed upstream Kubernetes but faced stability challenges and a lag in resolving bugs quickly enough to meet its business needs. Safaricom chose to move to Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, which provides production-ready maturity and carrier-grade stability along with enterprise-grade support.
Duncan Kabira Ndirangu, head of IT infrastructure, Safaricom said, “We are glad to have Red Hat as a strategic partner to Safaricom, helping our teams succeed with technology modernisation that supports our people-centric company mission. Customer experience is paramount for us and with Red Hat’s platforms and support teams we have been able to gain performance improvements across our entire IT infrastructure.”
Safaricom collaborated with Copy Cat Group, an experienced systems integrator, as well as the Red Hat team to deploy the platform and develop a roadmap for application modernisation. This included aligning processes across Safaricom’s security, application development and platform teams. The companies ran joint technical workshops and a developer day to get the teams upskilled on DevOps and agile methodologies. Safaricom in 2024 then expanded to Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus to harness Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for additional cybersecurity capabilities, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes for holistic orchestration of its workloads at scale and Red Hat Quay, a security-focused and scalable private registry platform for managing content across globally distributed datacenter and cloud environments.
Red Hat OpenShift is now the core Kubernetes-based platform in Safaricom’s IT environment, running all of its containers and supporting approximately 70% of its tier 1 and tier 2 applications. It is moving much of its estate to Red Hat OpenShift on bare-metal for greater control, increased economic efficiencies and more flexible scale-out capabilities. Benefits that Safaricom has seen so far are as follows:
- Customer experience improvements for internal as well as external users;
- Greater platform stability, achieving up to 99.98% availability compared to 93% before, and faster time to resolution of issues with the help of a Red Hat technical account manager;
- Faster time-to-market, including up to 2x faster turnaround time (TAT) for solution deployments. For example, Hustler Fund, a digital financial inclusion initiative designed to improve access to responsible finance for personal, micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises, took just one month from conception through design to market;
- Expanded automation capabilities such as automated pipelines are providing greater efficiency and productivity. Cluster deployment time has reduced to around two hours from around two days it took previously. Policy enforcement and standardisation across multiple clusters is now possible centrally;
- Growing confidence across teams in being able to run container and cloud-native workloads reliably alongside increasing collaboration and silo-busting thanks to a common cloud platform layer;
- Increased scalability – Safaricom can adapt to high and low traffic peaks in its various applications and scale up and down based on demand, supporting a stronger future innovation roadmap;
- Additional security capabilities are in-built to Red Hat OpenShift and can be managed consistently across the hybrid cloud.
James Maitai, chief technology information Officer, Safaricom said, “Red Hat has been a pivotal partner in Safaricom’s journey from a traditional telecommunications company to a technology-driven organisation.”
