How Sberbank finally got rid of Oracle in a processing that serves more than 200 million cards

How Sberbank finally got rid of Oracle in a processing that serves more than 200 million cards

On September 25, 2024, Semyon Utkin, who is responsible for the development and promotion of high-performance DBMS in Sber Tech, speaking at the TAdviser Banks IT Day conference, spoke about how Sberbank abandoned Oracle in processing in favor of its own solutions, and what constitutes a new processing.

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TAdviser

Previously, Oracle monolith was used for processing at Sberbank. During the migration process, products began to be transferred to a new solution in turn. To begin with, cards began to run on a processor using a new technology stack. Instead of imported DBMS, it uses Sberbank's own DBMS - Platform V DataGrid based on Apache Ignite and Platform V Pangolin based on PostgreSQL.

DataGrid is a "hot" storage in which all information about maps, their maintenance, release, re-release, etc. It stores data in RAM, but optionally you can put it on disk or in a third-party DBMS. And Pangolin is a "cold" storage. And everything was launched on standard equipment with an x86 architecture.

source = From the presentation of Semyon Utkin

Smooth migration to your own processing solution began back in 2021. According to Semyon Utkin, it was seamless for customers. At the same time, the process was not without stuffing cones: "it was very difficult, I had to rewrite the applied procedures for a new solution," says a representative of Sber Tech.

Sberbank announced the completion of the transition to its own processing platform for issuing and servicing bank cards in early September 2024.

We have come a long way of migrating with Oracle, "said Semyon Utkin.

DataGrid is now a cluster of 32 nodes of 700 GB of data. It contains all information about cards and stores information about all transactions over the past three months, provides 4.5 thousand financial transactions per second and 14.5 thousand information requests. In total, more than 200 million active debit and credit card contracts are served on their own processing, a representative of Sber Tech cited data at the TAdviser Banks IT Day conference.

From the presentation of Semyon Utkin

Processing is one of the highly loaded systems in Sberbank, where its own high-performance DBMS is used. Instead of proprietary software, you can use open source, however, as Semyon Utkin noted, open source out of the box is not suitable for use in a large corporate sector. The reasons are as follows. First, it is not secure enough: to store confidential data, such solutions need to be significantly redone, eliminating vulnerabilities and removing dependencies. Improvements are also needed in terms of resiliency and scalability. And the third: to develop and support open source, expertise is required, which is quite small on the market, and it is expensive.

Actually, faced with similar problems a few years ago, Sberbank decided to create its own high-load Platform V DataGrid DBMS. Collectively, this DBMS is now used by more than 200 systems in Sberbank, 30 of which are business-critical.

According to TAdviser, if we talk about all IT systems of Sberbank, then dependence on Oracle has been eliminated by about 80% to date.

Complete Migration

On September 2, 2024, Sberbank announced a complete transition to its own processing platform for issuing and servicing bank cards. All card operations are now performed without the participation of solutions from Oracle. The transition went unnoticed by customers without causing disruption or requiring changes to the service environment.

The new processing was developed by the Sber Tech team and is based on the Platform V DataGrid database management system. This decision was completely patented and entered into the register of domestic software. During 2023, a pilot project was carried out, in which the system was tested on bank employees. Since the beginning of 2024, the migration process has entered the mass phase, and by August 2024 it has been fully completed. Sberbank processing supports about 200 million active debit and credit cards.

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Bloomberg

First Deputy Chairman of the Board of Sberbank Kirill Tsarev noted that the bank's most important task was to ensure the continuity of the service and the stealth of the transition for customers. As a result, debit card migration was seamless and credit cards were re-issued free of charge with improved user conditions.

According to representatives of Sberbank, the new processing architecture significantly exceeds the old one in a number of indicators. The former system was built on a monolithic architecture using a central database and many servers, which limited its performance and flexibility. The new Platform V DataGrid-based platform provides high load resistance and is adapted for high transaction volume in real time. This solution is designed to maintain stable operation of financial systems, large marketplaces and billing systems even in the face of a significant increase in the number of requests, for example, during sales periods.