 Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got a great segment here on taming complexity. Niranjan Ramzunder and Raghu Bungula, Senior Vice President of Engineering, T-Sys. And Niranjan is the Chief Technology Officer of UST. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. You've got a great use case here, taming complexity. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you, John, pleasure to be here. So this is a great example of some of the major wave we're seeing coming in that we're reporting this re-invent is that this next generation of cloud scale powered by data and business value at the modern application layer at the top of this new stack, if you will, going to call that. This is the theme everyone's talking about. You got edge, all these things are happening. But at the heart of it is the complexity. So Niranjan, take us through what you guys are doing at UST with Raghu and his journey on the transformation, set us up. Sure, thanks John and Raghu, thanks for joining us. So when you look at AWS, John, you got it right. The situation has matured to a level where the real complex applications, the one which needs low latency, high throughput are now moving to the cloud and concerns about data security, about privacy, about how to manage systems that are not in my control are now getting resolved. And an important example of that is what thesis and Raghu are doing in the sense of really taking their core functionalities, their fundamental business processes and moving into the cloud. So it has been a great experience for us working with Raghu and the entire thesis team on how a business function moves. What are the reasons why you would move? What considerations will you have? And then, you know, proving that it really is functional. That is critical because business has to see value. It's not just cloud because it's attractive. It is because cloud has a purpose. So we'd love to hear from Raghu as well on what are the motivations, but that is really what excites us. Raghun, before you get into the why on the transformation, I just want to set it up. You guys are running a very big business. You have a lot of business legacy systems built in place. You're transforming to the cloud. You can't just kill the old to bring in the new. You got to work together. This is part of the benefit of the cloud. So with that said, take us through the journey. What's the purpose? What's the problem you're trying to solve? Take us through the highlights. Sure, John, thank you. Thank you for giving me an opportunity to talk here. So as I mentioned, I'm Raghu Bumbulla. I lead the delivery of platform modernization and cloud migration programs at pieces, pieces which is part of global payments, is focused on payments and car processing for the issuer banks. We are the number one car issuer processor in the United States. And I think we lead in many countries across the world. So we run the most mission critical systems in the financial services. So our platforms are a combination of low latency workloads, which span in thousands of transactions per second, and also high throughput workloads, like a high throughput batch workloads, which deal with the hundreds and thousands of transactions per second in the current mainframes. So our challenge has been how to take these systems, which have been so successful for so many years, to the cloud. How do we kind of take that? How do we kind of approach that? That has been our challenge. I think we have been in this journey along with USD to solve those. The motivations for us, from my perspective, to take our platforms to the cloud. There are many, but these are some of them, the first one being the business agility. Right now, I think, like any other company who is running on-premise, they are bound by the infrastructure and the rigid state of the data centers. So cloud provides us agility for us to take advantage of the infrastructure, take advantage of the services which are built, so that we don't have to build it ourselves. We can use those Lego blocks to solve the higher-order problems, for example. And so other advantage we have is ability for us to offer the solutions across the world. Now, today, if we go across the world and try to offer our solutions, we do, we are sometimes, I think, our force to build a data center which can be definitely expensive and also time-taking, and we lose the market opportunity in many of those cases. So what cloud does provide, in this case, AWS provides us with a span of regions that have across the world, it provides us an opportunity for us to quickly take our solution to any of these regions where we don't serve today. And last, but not the least, the security. So I think security is foremost, the security what we see in AWS is definitely meets our needs and our customers. And we feel that to get that sophistication, it's going to be more and more tougher in the on-premise environment. That's great stuff. I mean, Narajan, if we're talking about this all the time with cloud, this year and this kind of inflection point is where it goes the next level. Raghu's running a very successful global payments system, a lot of transactions. So the metaphor is range. Changing the airplane engine out at 30,000 feet, I've heard that one. That's kind of what's happening here. He's got to be successful. He can't just put the pause button. Yes, and there are more than one allegory which fits here. One is of course, the airplane engine changing. The second, the pilot is changing as well. So it's not just enough to take care of technology moves and ensure business still runs. But at the same time, the people who are supporting it today work on older technologies. They need to move along with the change so that we don't lose the knowledge they have of the systems. And one important part where we are contributing to this whole engagement is documenting their systems, which have been written over a period of 30 years and ensuring that all the rules and subroutines and the nested loops within that get translated correctly and get tested correctly as they move to the cloud. So it is definitely changing the engine, but the entire transformation has to be seamless and business should not know anything. It should be, nothing happened. We accept the novia on the cloud. That is really where the fun part is. Raghu, I want to ask you, when you guys sit in the room and say, okay, we got to do this, what are the key business benefits are expected from this modernization program? I mean, I get the agility, let's check the box. Yeah, we want to be more agile. What does that translate into from a benefit standpoint? Yeah, so business agility for us means, my ability to kind of adapt to the market needs as quickly as possible. Which is, we deal with different demographics, different regulatory environments across the world. So if a need arises to quickly build a payment product or a card product to serve a particular industry or a particular domain or a particular vertical, across the world, we want to be able to kind of quickly put together what we have in a marketable solution, okay? So that's what it means for us in the business agility. And we want to be able to across the world. So if you see an opportunity anywhere in the world, we want to be able to kind of quickly deploy our solution, tie our Lego pieces, build a product, or you know, configure a product which satisfies that particular vertical or that particular regulatory region across the world. All right, question for both of you guys. I'd love to ask the same question, if you don't mind answering it from the different perspectives that you're taking. What were the major challenges that you guys have anticipated and addressed in this program? Because, you know, this is probably gonna, I can almost guess how many times we bump up against something, this little speed bump, and it says, okay, whoa, okay, how do we do that? Because remember, it's all new sometimes, you're refactoring, you're not just replatforming. So can you share some of the major challenges that you've anticipated and how you've addressed them with this modernization program? Sure, I can go first and then, you know, and then feel free to add, you know, anything which I would have missed. From my perspective, I think, you know, when we run the most mission critical systems in the financial services, so a lot of customers depend on our systems to kind of perform their day-to-day financial needs, okay? So uptime, high-level tier utmost important to us. At the same time, ability to process through billions and billions of transactions we deal with every day, you know, that is of utmost importance to us. So the solutions have been running for a long time in the mainframes, tuned for many years, performing at scale, as mentioned again, you know, very low, low latency with the thousands of transactions per second, you know, in case of a real-time transactions or very high throughput, you know, workloads, ranging in hundreds and thousands of transactions per second. So taking, and again, in most cases or, you know, in our case, they're running as a monolith. Now, how do you take, you know, a system like this and break it down into microservices and deploy it on the cloud? And how do you deal with data, for example? So the data is sitting in one place. Now, you cannot, what you cannot do is come one day and turn off everything on the on-premise and put everything on the cloud for something like this. So you need an iterative migration path. How do you build an iteration migration path when the plane is moving and make it happen? I think that has been the challenge. The way we have water resources, we have built various patterns, you know, to kind of take the data to the cloud using, you know, a CQRS pattern, okay? Using a CDC and a CQRS pattern. So we built a tool called, or a framework called data fabric, which allows us to kind of seamlessly migrate the applications and where the applications can live on both ends and, you know, unsuccessfully, you know, serve the traffic. For example, we built techniques, you know, like a parallel testing using parallel testing framework, which allows us to kind of do a AB testing, which is the application is running on the cloud, application is running on on-premise, but we run the transaction, we compare it at both the locations and make sure that it behaves the way we have anticipated it to behave, for example. So these were some of the challenges we had and this was some of the techniques we have adopted in our case to solve that, you know, to solve that problem. Yes, to add to that, John, you know. Great, by the way, thanks for the insight. Awesome, thank you for sharing. Sure. To add to that, I think, what Ragu was saying, right? And what we formed with the project, what is happening is it has fundamental implications to people that really likes, you know, someone going to buy milk at the grocery store. I mean, they cannot have their transaction stopped. It is not like I can be 99% right, you have to be right. And therefore it's important that we capture the requirements in the right way and make sure that they are reflected correctly in the target. That's one part. The second part is that we are not, as you heard earlier from Ragu as well, not re-performing, we are rewriting a lot of critical activities because the paradigms have shifted. The way coding is done, the way you are, you know, composing code and the way you're writing functionalities have changed and therefore making sure that the principles have not changed, the functionalities have not changed. But the way of delivery is changing. That continuity of business functionality through the process has been a very interesting part of the project as far as we're concerned. We're still working progress, it's still going on. And it is really exciting to see how Ragu and the team have got this huge volumes and they've got a new way of working, both happening together. And that's what we are happy to participate in. Yeah. And just a quick highlight. I want to call out the fact that you're writing their own code, they're getting patents. This is the new normal, I mean, you got to build it. And this is all software value, this is what cloud does. I do want to give you a chance to explain to the folks UST and what the benefits are for working with you guys as an Amazon partner, implementation partner, what's the benefits that customers get? I'll say you've got migrations like this that are modernization programs, taming complexity, I'll say key, a key account here. What does other customers get for working with you? Yes. So AWS provides a lot of the technology underpinnings in terms of the functionality, the functions which are available out of the box in serverless category from AWS. You get a lot of capabilities in terms of that architecture and their support for the transformation. What we provide on top of it is a willingness to take ownership for outcomes that we make sure that what AWS offers is actually working for the end plan targeted, for example, thesis and make sure that we do it in a time and in a speed which meets business requirements and taking that ownership for outcomes is a very key add-on that UST provides to what AWS provides. There are other minor benefits, for example AWS will invest in something that a partner with UST in terms of migration, in terms of some subsidy of the work required in the initial stages but the real value comes because we make sure that AWS and pieces are both successful and it becomes our job to make sure that we are part of a successful roll out rather than just a roll out.RAGOO, I got to ask you, obviously the fun part is writing code and when you have DevOps and DevSecOps fully operational it's infrastructure as code that's the dream scenario, right? So how close are you to that and what's next on this modernization wave? Yeah, as part of this journey I think what we have embarked is, I think infrastructure as code is kind of the base for now, foundational element. I think everything what we are doing as part of this migration, we are taking advantage of how a large enterprise should operate. Like we operate across the world, we have teams across the world building a lot of solutions every day. So we have built infrastructure code using something called Service Catalog. It's offering from AWS to help with large enterprises converting to the or migrating to the cloud. So we are using that as a foundational layer to help us build that. And I think we are looking forward to a day, I think, where we migrate all of our applications and take advantage of the true power of the cloud especially in the data space, in the ML space and in areas we are not necessarily are not able to as easily adapt on the on-premise. Narendra Raghu, thank you so much for coming on to theCUBE sharing the UST story, TSIS, great customer example really great use case, great insights into taming complexity because that's what now the opportunity is to do and to recast and reset and refactor business, innovation. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, John. Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you very much, John and Raghu. CUBE's coverage here at theCUBE, ADEP is reinvent 2020, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.