Safaricom, Kenya’s telecommunications giant serving over 45 million subscribers, has significantly upgraded its infrastructure by deploying Red Hat OpenShift, a move that directly impacts the reliability and speed of its critical applications, including the renowned M-Pesa system.
This strategic shift is pivotal for the telco, which processes over $314 billion in transactions annually for 51 million customers across Africa through M-PESA.
The company stated that its ambition to become Africa’s leading purpose-led technology company by 2025 demanded a move away from traditional, monolithic infrastructures towards a cloud-native, containerized architecture.
“Safaricom has high requirements around agility, stability and scale-out design to support its business-critical applications where performance directly impacts customers, including millions of users reliant on M-Pesa banking services,” stated Fran Heeran, vice president, Global Telecommunications, Red Hat.
Initially, Safaricom said it experimented with upstream Kubernetes but encountered stability challenges and slow bug resolution.
Leveraging their existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Satellite infrastructure, they transitioned to Red Hat OpenShift, seeking enterprise-grade support and carrier-grade stability.
“We are glad to have Red Hat as a strategic partner to Safaricom, helping our teams succeed with technology modernisation that supports our people-centric company mission. Customer experience is paramount for us and with Red Hat’s platforms and support teams we have been able to gain performance improvements across our entire IT infrastructure,” said Duncan Kabira Ndirangu, head of IT infrastructure, Safaricom.
Collaborating with Copy Cat Group and Red Hat, Safaricom implemented a comprehensive modernization roadmap, including joint technical workshops and developer days focusing on DevOps and agile methodologies.
In 2024, Safaricom further expanded its deployment to Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, integrating Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, and Red Hat Quay for enhanced security and management capabilities.
Red Hat OpenShift now serves as the core Kubernetes platform, running all of Safaricom’s containers and supporting approximately 70% of its tier 1 and tier 2 applications.
The company is migrating much of its infrastructure to Red Hat OpenShift on bare-metal for improved control and efficiency.
The deployment has yielded significant results such as:
Customer experience improvements: Enhanced performance for both internal and external users.
Greater platform stability: The firm says it has achieved up to 99.98% availability, a substantial increase from the previous 93%, alongside faster issue resolution with Red Hat support.
Faster time-to-market: Solution deployment turnaround time (TAT) has been halved. For example, the Hustler Fund, a digital financial inclusion initiative, launched in just one month.
Expanded automation capabilities: Cluster deployment time reduced from approximately two days to around two hours, with centralized policy enforcement.
Growing team confidence: the telco noted to see increased collaboration and reliable container and cloud-native workload management.
Increased scalability: Ability to adapt to traffic peaks and scale based on demand.
Enhanced security: Consistent security management across the hybrid cloud.
“Red Hat has been a pivotal partner in Safaricom’s journey from a traditional telecommunications company to a technology-driven organisation,” stated James Maitai, chief technology information Officer, Safaricom.