Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions, has announced at MWC25 that Kenyan operator Safaricom has deployed Red Hat OpenShift as a common cloud platform for applications, including the M-Pesa mobile payment system.
Safaricom has more than 45 million subscribers and the widest modern mobile network coverage in Kenya. It runs sensitive applications with high uptime and stability requirements. This includes third party applications that connect to the renowned M-Pesa core platform, a mobile payment system that supports 51 million customers making over US$314 billion in transactions per year across Africa.
Safaricom’s vision is to be Africa’s leading purpose-led technology company by 2025. To fulfil this vision, Safaricom identified the need to move from monolithic, traditional infrastructures to a cloud-native, container and microservices-based architecture that provides a flexible, stable foundation to grow and support its digital requirements.
Building on its use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a stable, reliable and flexible Linux platform and Red Hat Satellite for infrastructure management, Safaricom sought an open source solution for containerisation. Initially, Safaricom deployed upstream Kubernetes but faced stability challenges and a lag in resolving bugs quickly enough to meet its business needs. Safaricom then chose to move to Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, which provides production-ready maturity and carrier-grade stability along with enterprise-grade support.
Safaricom collaborated with Copy Cat Group, an experienced systems integrator, as well as the Red Hat team to deploy the platform and develop a roadmap for application modernisation. This included aligning processes across Safaricom’s security, application development and platform teams.
The companies ran joint technical workshops and a developer day to get the teams upskilled on DevOps and agile methodologies.
Safaricom in 2024 then expanded to Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus to harness Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for additional cybersecurity capabilities, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes for holistic orchestration of its workloads at scale and Red Hat Quay, a security-focused and scalable private registry platform for managing content across globally distributed data center and cloud environments.
Red Hat OpenShift is now the core Kubernetes-based platform in Safaricom’s IT environment, running all of its containers and supporting approximately 70% of its tier 1 and tier 2 applications. It is moving much of its estate to Red Hat OpenShift on bare-metal for greater control, increased economic efficiencies and more flexible scale-out capabilities. Benefits that Safaricom has seen include customer experience improvements, greater platform stability, faster time-to-market, expanded automation capabilities, increased scalability and additional security.
Looking ahead, Safaricom is assessing the opportunity to expand these benefits into the network space, such as its 5G core, by expanding its Red Hat OpenShift footprint. The team is working on a proof-of-concept to kick off and define the process before scaling up to onboard the full team and applications.