Discover’s hybrid cloud journey pays off

Discover’s implementation is unique in that it operates its OpenShift platform in AWS virtual private clouds (VPC) on an AWS multi-tenant public cloud infrastructure, and with this approach, OpenShift allows for abstraction to the cloud, explains Ed Calusinski, Discover’s VP of enterprise architecture and technology strategy.  

For many years, the Riverwood, Ill.-based finserv hosted workloads on a cloud platform within its own data centers. The OpenShift hybrid approach gives Discover the choice to run workloads on private or public clouds, enabling it to better manage and move workloads to multiple clouds and prevent vendor lock-in.

“More workloads were moved [to the cloud] in the first six months of this year than in all the years before, by far, orders of magnitude more,” Strle says. “Due to the elasticity of the environment, we were able to handle circumstances such as big surges, and that’s very important to us because of the way we do marketing and campaigns and different ways people interact with our rewards. That can lead to very spiky consumer behavior, and we can dynamically grow our capacity on public clouds.”