MoneyGram’s Journey from Command Line to Kubernetes Platform

At theCUBE’s coverage of Kubecon 2022, EU, MoneyGram’s Enterprise Architect Adnan Khan and Haseeb Budhani, CEO of Rafay, discussed MoneyGram’s journey to Kubernetes Management Platform and how Rafay has simplified and improved their Kubernetes operations.

Adnan, what did your pre-Kubernetes landscape look like?

Adnan Khan: We had a traditional mix of legacy applications and modern applications. A few years ago we made the decision to move to a microservices architecture, and this was all happening while we were still on-prem. So, your traditional VMs. And we started 20 or 30 microservices. But with the microservices packing, you quickly expand to hundreds of microservices. We started getting to that stage where managing them without sort of an orchestration platform, just as traditional VMs, was getting to be really challenging, especially from a day two operational perspective. You can manage 10 or 15 microservices fine, but when you start having 50, all those concerns around high availability, operational performance become real.

So, we started looking at some open-source projects. Spring cloud for example, because we are predominantly a Java shop. They give you several initiatives for doing some management, but to manage those components without sort of a platform was really challenging. That kind of led us to Kubernetes which was the platform that could help us with a lot of those management operational concerns.

So, as you talk about some of those challenges, pre-Kubernetes, what were some of the operational issues that you folks experienced?

Adnan Khan: A fundamental concept of cloud native is how to auto-scale. You can utilize old methods, but that is hard to do automatically. Kubernetes provides those tools out of the box. And, if you set the right policies, you can have auto-scaling that can scale up and scale back, which we had been doing manually.

During the holiday season, MoneyGram knows people are sending more money. On Mother’s Day, our Ops team would need to manually scale VMs. We’d go from four instances to maybe eight instances, but that entailed outages. The process to plan doing that manually, and then scale them back was a lot of administration overhead. We wanted something that could help us do that automatically in an efficient, unintrusive way.

So, operational issues, you ask? Monitoring and management operations, visibility into how those applications were during, and the status of workloads, were our key challenges.

“A fundamental concept of cloud native is how to auto-scale. You can utilize old methods, but that is hard to do automatically. Kubernetes provides those tools out of the box.” – Adnan Khan, MoneyGram

Haseeb, how does your group help solve some of these challenges?

Haseeb Budhani: Here’s my perspective on the market as it’s playing out: I see a bifurcation happening in the Kubernetes space. Amazon has EKS, Azure has AKS. If you’re Amazon, why would you spin up your own? Just use EKS, it’s awesome. But then, there’s an operational layer that is needed to run Kubernetes.

My perspective is that 50,000 enterprises will be adopting Kubernetes over the next 5 to 10 years. And they’re all going to go through the same exact journey, and they’re all going to end up potentially making the same mistake, to assume that Kubernetes is easy. They’re going to say, “Well, this is not hard. I got this up and running on my laptop. This is so easy, no worries. I can do EKS.”

I think that Kubernetes is fundamentally here to solve a problem. When it comes to the operations layer, we end up investing in a DevOps team, and then an SRE organization that needs to become experts in Kubernetes, and that is not tenable. Let’s say unlimited capital, unlimited budgets. Can you hire 20 people to do Kubernetes today? If you can find them. Even if you could, the point is that five years ago, it was a competitive advantage to go build a team to do Kubernetes so you could move faster. Today, there’s a high chance that your competitors are already buying from a Rafay or similar organization. Building operations for Kubernetes, this is a commodity now.

“Can you hire 20 people to do Kubernetes today? Even if you could, the point is that five years ago, it was a competitive advantage to go build a team to do Kubernetes so you could move faster. Today, there’s a high chance that your competitors are already buying from a Rafay” – Haseeb Budhani

What brought MoneyGram to Rafay to solve this operational challenge?

Adnan Khan: We realized very quickly, that, AWS manages the control plane for you, it gives you the high availability. So, you’re not managing those components which is some really heavy lifting. But what about all the other things like a centralized dashboard? What about the need to provision Kubernetes clusters on multicloud?

That led us down the path of asking, “Hey, what’s out there in this space?” And we realized quickly that there weren’t too many. There were some large providers, but we felt that it was a little too much for what we were trying to do at that point in time. We wanted to scale slowly. We wanted to minimize our footprint, and Rafay was a nice mix from all those different angles.

How was the situation affecting your developer experience?

Adnan Khan: Operations was one aspect to it, the other was the application development. We have a plethora of technologies from Java, to .net, to node.js. Then you start saying, “Okay, now we’re going cloud native and we’re going to start deploying to Kubernetes.”

So, initially, we just trained our developers. And that was wrong. You can’t assume that everyone is going to sort of learn all these deployment concerns and will adopt them. That’s a fair amount of overhead and learning curve there.

So, Rafay, from their dashboard perspective, saw the managed Kubectl, that gives you easy access, where you can go and monitor the status of their workloads. Before Rafay, it was being done from a command line. And again, just getting some of the tools configured was huge. It took us days just to get that. And then the learning curve for development teams; “Oh, now you have the tools, now you have to figure out how to use them.”

Rafay is up against VMware, up against Google. They’re both trying to do sort of the same thing you’re doing. Why are you succeeding?

Haseeb Budhani: Maybe it’s focus. Maybe it’s because of the right experience. Only in hindsight can one tell why a startup was successful. I’ve been in one or two startups in the past, and there’s a lot of luck to it, there’s a lot of timing to it. I think this timing for a product like this is perfect. Three or four years ago nobody would’ve cared. This is the right time to have a product like this in the market because so many enterprises are now thinking of modernization. We’re going to have strong partners for the long term.

MoneyGram’s website tagline is: “Fast. Simple. Reliable.” That could be used to describe the development and Kubernetes environment that Rafay provides. MoneyGram is on a Kubernetes journey and Rafay just may be their final destination. To watch this interview in its entirety please visit https://www.rafay.co/customers.