Safaricom on Monday announced the adoption of Red Hat OpenShift as the foundational platform for its apps, including the popular M-PESA mobile payment system.

Already, Safaricom’s transactions across Africa exceed $314 billion annually, with over 45 million subscribers and 51 million M-PESA users. By 2025, Safaricom aims to establish itself as Africa’s foremost technology-driven company.

In the past, Safaricom relied on upstream Kubernetes and conventional infrastructure but encountered issues with stability and bug fixes.

To solve these problems, the organisation adopted Red Hat OpenShift, a Kubernetes-powered hybrid cloud application platform. This platform offers enterprise-grade support and carrier-grade stability, enabling Safaricom to deploy containerised applications more efficiently.

Collaborative technical workshops and developer training were conducted with Red Hat and Copy Cat Group to align teams on DevOps and agile methods.

Safaricom increased its usage of Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus in 2024 by incorporating cutting-edge solutions for scalable content management, workload orchestration and cybersecurity.

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Enhancing M-PESA performance with OpenShift

The deployment of Red Hat OpenShift has transformed Safaricom’s IT environment. Currently, the platform supports 70 percent of Safaricom’s tier 1 and tier 2 applications while running all containers on bare-metal infrastructure for improved control and cost efficiency. 

This upgrade has resulted in a higher availability rate of 99.98 percent compared to the previous 93 percent.

With solution deployment speed doubled, cluster deployment times have dropped from two days to two hours. These changes have improved operations, teamwork, and customer experience for internal and external users.

Duncan Kabira Ndirangu, Head of IT Infrastructure at Safaricom, stated, “We are glad to have Red Hat as a strategic partner to Safaricom.”

Ndirangu said that “with Red Hat’s platforms and support teams we have been able to gain performance improvements across our entire IT infrastructure.”

“This has given our teams the confidence to deploy cloud-native applications, which is a significant step for us as we transition our infrastructure into a platform for business innovation – both for IT and network capabilities,” he added.