Santander's Catalyst: Revolutionizing Cloud Infrastructure with Platform Engineering

The Challenge: Scale, Complexity, and Time

Santander, a global financial services company, faced immense technical challenges managing an infrastructure supporting over 200 critical systems and billions of daily transactions. Their expansion into diverse financial services led to unprecedented technological complexity. Key issues included ensuring provisioned services adhered to established architectural definitions and reducing the lengthy infrastructure provisioning time, which often took up to 90 days. This required significant operational effort and highlighted the need for a more agile, scalable, and standardized approach.

Catalyst: A Platform Engineering Solution

The solution, named Catalyst, was developed in conjunction with AWS's Platform Strategy Program (PSP). This platform abstracts infrastructure provisioning complexity, standardizes architectural compliance, and provides a framework for integrating new technologies. It features an in-house developer portal for a unified interface to provisioning and resource management.

Core Architecture of Catalyst

At the heart of Catalyst is a control plane cluster built on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). This cluster orchestrates all components and workflows. Crossplane plays a crucial role as a universal resource provisioner, enabling consistent and declarative resource management across multiple cloud providers. This multi-cloud capability is a significant architectural decision, reducing vendor lock-in and leveraging best-of-breed services.

• Data Plane Claims: Managed by ArgoCD, leveraging GitOps for continuous synchronization and deployment of application stacks and configurations.
• Policies Catalog: A central repository using Open Policy Agent (OPA) to enforce compliance and security across all operations.
• Stacks Catalog: A library of Crossplane composite resource definitions and compositions for standardized and rapid environment creation.