Swiss Federal Railways Drives Cloud Migration with Red Hat

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of enterprise open source solutions, today announced a collaboration with Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) to help complete an extensive IT migration project. Using Red Hat AMQ Streams, Red Hat Consulting helped move Apache Kafka services to SBB’s new cloud environment with minimal effects on uptime. 

The pressure of rising costs reached a significant level during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, SBB’s IT team decided to move their workloads to another cloud environment to increase flexibility and lower costs.

SBB’s IT department was tasked with completing this project in a short time frame. While a considerable part of the application services was successfully migrated as planned, moving infrastructure such as Apache Kafka was delayed. SBB turned to Red Hat to help overcome technical complexities during the migration.

Despite a tight schedule, a short learning phase for the teams and the steady growth of SBB’s Kafka data platform during the migration, the SBB Kafka and Red Hat Consulting teams managed to successfully migrate 57 applications in time, including tools for customer service, enterprise backend systems and capacity planning. During the process, operation of the rapidly growing data platform was not disrupted. Even data-heavy applications, including mission-critical services for SBB, continued to operate with minimal downtime. 

SBB and Red Hat teams opted for a more resilient, step-by-step migration according to DevOps principles, which were constantly refined in cross-team collaboration. Platform engineering helped provide self-service capabilities with automated infrastructure operations to help speed up the deployment and operation of new services for development teams, as well as simplifying IT operations.

Supporting Quotes

Richard Zobrist, country manager Switzerland, Red Hat

"With the rising costs railways have felt since the pandemic, building agile and interoperable cloud platforms has become vital for railway organizations to drive the most value from their technology investments. Red Hat's expertise in open communication, agile and DevOps practices has helped SBB efficiently move to a more flexible cloud environment."

Thierry Peng, product manager at SBB

"The collaboration with Red Hat's team of experts worked well, and together we were able to complete a complex project in due time. Overall, the cloud migration was an important milestone in our IT modernization, enabling SBB to meet the customer needs of the future.”