How Docker Is Taking Visa Everywhere It Wants To Be

AUSTIN, Texas — Visa is one of the world’s most trusted brands, and at DockerCon 17 today, Swamy Kocherlakota, SVP, Global Head of Infrastructure and Operations at Visa, told a capacity keynote audience why Visa trusts Docker.

Kocherlakota said there are some 3.1 billion Visa cards in use today, and the company processes $5.8 trillion in payments every year. As a platform, Kocherlakota commented that the goal is to make the electronic payment platform as accessible to everyone, everywhere as possible.

Visa is also aiming to open its platform to help drive innovation forward, and for developers the goal is to be able to deploy code rapidly.

The opportunity Docker represents to Visa is that it can improve developer productivity as well as provide a standard way to compose, package, deploy and manage services. The end goal for Visa is that by embracing Docker, Visa can achieve simplicity in its end-to-end lifecycle management.

Kocherlakota said Visa has now been live in production with its Docker deployment for six months. The Docker-based platform is currently helping to process 100,000 transactions per day across multiple global regions.

With Docker, Kocherlakota said Visa has been able to reduce its application provisioning time. Additionally, maintenance and patching has become significantly improved, which is an area where Visa spends a lot of time with the non-container infrastructure components of its business.

Lessons Learned in Move to Containerization

Visa has learned some valuable lessons so far with its move to containers. For one, Kocherlakota said that understanding the granularity of micro-services has been important.

Another challenge faced by Visa has been dealing with memory footprint management and how it is different than working in non-container deployments. Lastly, he noted that load balancing of container applications is critical and is an area Visa is still figuring out.

Kocherlakota said Visa is aiming to move as many workloads at it can to the container model to help improve overall efficiency. Overall, mixing and matching the right micro-services containers in a constant stream reminded Kocherlakota of a classic 1980’s arcade game.

“Containers provides a ‘Tetris-like’ infrastructure,” Kocherlakota said.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at ServerWatch and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.