Humio at Lunar Way: Log Management for a Kubernetes and Cloud Native Environment

This blog was originally published on humio.com. Humio is a CrowdStrike Company.

While the technology world moves pretty fast, there are still institutions lagging behind in the move to the modern. Lunar Way looks to handle one of these institutions, the banking industry, and bring things forward into the 21st Century.

Based in Denmark, Lunar Way is innovating the banking industry by bringing digital only transactions to the banking industry. The idea is to build out APIs that interact with brick and mortar banking organizations, making it easier for consumers to find and use more products and more focused features than might be available if they were forced to bank 9 am to 5 pm weekdays, as is common at most banks.

With a line of many different banking products, including credit cards and the Travel Card that make it easier on travelers, Lunar Way focuses on innovation. This means a fairly tight development and deployment schedule, which can bring about as many as ten to twenty deployments a day across their various mobile and web product lines. The need for analytics and log management is apparent every day.

The NoSQL of Log Management

When Lunar Way began their journey, they started with a simple Elasticsearch and Kibana setup in AWS. Initially, the logs were small, so this was easy. As time passed and the products became more diverse and more complex, issues began to surface with usability, compatibility, and the day-to-day usefulness. The Elastic Query Language was a problem and Kibana seemed to always come with difficulties. It was obvious a change had to happen.

Around this time, some of the team members saw a presentation on Humio at GOTO Copenhagen. It seemed interesting, but the move to Humio wasn’t immediate. It was only as the applications grew, and the infrastructure supporting needed to grow that Elastic stack was no longer an option and it was time for Humio.

Security being a key part of what any bank does, Lunar Way is no different. They needed an on-premises solution that would work with their private AWS cluster; something they wouldn’t need to send their logs to Humio, they needed everything to remain within their network. Luckily, Humio works well as an on-prem solution, which stands out from Elastic Cloud and other log management systems that require logs be sent out or exported to external services.

Another of the big differentiators for Lunar Way was that Humio did not require a schema for logs to start rolling in. As Bjørn Sørensen, Web Architect at Lunar Way, states, “Humio is the NoSQL of log management. We miss less in our logs because it’s not excluded by a schema”. It’s possible to use filters to see results directly without having to work through a detailed schema to get the desired results.

Using Humio to manage their logs to examine both application layer data and infrastructure level information, the folks at Lunar Way became aware of the need for a solution that gave the complete view, across all microservices — which is their chosen architecture. Humio gave them the collation of events both up and downstream, providing them with insights to prevent issues before they might occur.

Kubernetes and Humio Become Part of the Lunar Way

The interesting factor at Lunar Way is that they are big Kubernetes users. Using Kubernetes to manage their 35–40 different Microservices makes them unusual in Denmark and frankly unique in the Fintech industry. While creating a new way to look at Fintech, Lunar Way DevOps Engineer Kasper Nissen knew proper, modern DevOps ideals and infrastructure were needed to launch banking into the modern age. And Humio was at the heart of that launch.

Using things beyond their expected capabilities is part of what Lunar Way focuses on. Beyond taking kubernetes to the bank, Lunar Way also uses Humio in unexpected ways. A good example is their mobile team. When testing new application functionality on iOS or Android, the team takes advantage of their Humio installation to get instant feedback on what’s going right (or wrong) with a new piece of code being prepared to face the world. This allows for rapid turn around and a shorter development cycle, which in turn means more features and fixes in less time.

At this point, all teams at Lunar Way are using Humio as part of the daily development routine. With an extension into the dashboards used around the offices, everyone can keep an eye on logs and the graphs they produce to ensure all needs are being met and everything is running smoothly.

Humio helps Lunar Way to bring Fintech to the forefront of the tech world in Denmark, and soon around the world. To learn more about Humio and how you can gain the most of your logs, check out Humio.com or get started with a Free Trial.

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