The challenge
BBVA is a global financial group serving more than 77.2 million active customers and more than 125,000 employees. BBVA is one of the largest banks in Europe, operates in more than 25 countries and is active across Europe, Asia-Pacific and the United States. BBVA is one of the world’s top ten banks for international trade finance according to Euromoney, and is in the top fifty for banks overall according to S&P Global.
BBVA has six strategic priorities in its new 2025-2029 plan, focused on radically embedding the customer perspective, driving sustainability and growth in all Enterprise segments by creating value and capital, and maximizing the potential of AI and innovation through the availability of data and technologies. To achieve this, the bank relies on its people, processes and technology to support an engaged team and make use of its data.
The BBVA technology team had made an early commitment to using Document-oriented as a NoSQL database. The technology suited the bank’s aims around agility, so this Database was adopted widely for applications. However, as the bank’s IT needs evolved, it found that the licensing restrictions for this Database Provider were no longer in line with its requirements. The BBVA CTO and enterprise architects tasked the data team, led by David Jimenez Ausin (Batch Architecture & Databases and Product Owner NoSQL & SQL, BBVA) and Alvaro Acebes Gobernado (PaaS & Banking Architectures, BBVA), to look for alternatives.
The solution
BBVA looked to Percona as a solution to its problems around restrictive and expensive licensing. BBVA needed enterprise-grade software it could drop into its environment, did not lock into a specific vendor’s platform, and would deliver the exceptional support levels the bank required. Based on these criteria, Percona ticked all the boxes. The BBVA team worked with Percona to understand all the applications that used this Document-oriented database and then how to migrate them to Percona’s distribution.
This included looking at more than 80 application deployments deployed across more than 400 servers. With so many enterprise applications to support - and with strict demands around availability, management and data backup to respect - Jimenez Ausin and Acebes Gobernado had to be sure that their migration kept up with the enterprise’s expectations.
To replace Document-oriented as a NoSQL database, the BBVA team decided to use Percona Server for MongoDB with Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) for managing all those server instances and Percona Backup for MongoDB (PBM) to provide data backup and resilience.
Percona Server for MongoDB is a source-available, enterprise-grade drop-in replacement for MongoDB Community Edition. It provides a rich assortment of enterprise-class features and improvements for MongoDB deployments. For BBVA, this meant they could migrate their applications quickly and with no change to their existing applications or code.
PBM is open source software and provides consistent backups of MongoDB clusters, including sharding support across distributed environments. With PBM, BBVA could easily make logical, physical, incremental selective and snapshot backups and restores for their MongoDB instances, as well as having point-in-time recovery functionality to specific timestamps.
Working with Percona
Working with the Percona team, Jimenez Ausin and Acebes Gobernado led the migration planning efforts. From initial deployments with Percona Server for MongoDB, PMM and PBM, the BBVA team saw that they could replicate the enterprise-class deployment they had in place at a much lower cost for licensing and support.
When the team tested their backup performance, they found that they achieved a performance improvement over their previous approach. With PBM, Jimenez Ausin and Acebes Gobernado saw they could provide a full backup for their MongoDB instances and recover 20 percent faster.
Percona provided a strong alternative to the highly expensive license option that the bank had used previously. While we believe and rely on MongoDB as a technology, we decided to choose Percona as we could get more control over our database strategy in future. As we moved over to Percona’s enterprise-ready options, we were able to improve our data backup performance as well - so we reduced our cost, got better control over our future strategy and improved results.
David Jimenez Ausin
Batch Architecture & Databases and Product Owner NoSQL & SQL, BBVA
BBVA faced a challenge around its approach to MongoDB - while this database runs more than 80 applications across the bank’s infrastructure, the bank did not want to carry on being subject to expensive licenses and loss of control around its deployment strategy. BBVA moved to Percona for database performance, management and reliability without lock-in.
The project delivered the following results:
✓ Move to Percona Server for MongoDB delivers enterprise class performance without lock-in or license problems.
✓ Percona Monitoring and Management provides management across more than 80 applications (+300 Databases and 35 Terabytes of data migrated), running on more than 400 instances, with fine-grained monitoring control, allowing for rapid monitoring and alerting of critical incidents.
✓ Percona Backup for MongoDB delivers data backup at scale and with better performance.
About BBVA
BBVA is a global financial services group founded in 1857. The bank is present in more than 25 countries, has a strong leadership position in the Spanish market, is the largest financial institution in Mexico and it has leading franchises in South America and Turkey.
BBVA contributes with its activity to the progress and welfare of all its stakeholders: shareholders, clients, employees, providers and society in general. In this regard, BBVA supports families, entrepreneurs and companies in their plans, and helps them to take advantage of the opportunities provided by innovation and technology. Likewise, BBVA offers its customers a unique value proposition, leveraged on technology and data, helping them improve their financial health with personalized information on financial decision-making.
Contact Us
To learn more about Percona’s services, contact us at +1-888-401-3401 in North America, +44 (203) 608-6727 in Europe, or sales@percona.com
