10 March 2025

With over 45 million subscribers, Safaricom boasts the most extensive modern mobile network in Kenya. Its operations are critical, requiring robust uptime and stability for sensitive applications. Among these is M-Pesa, which enables 51 million customers to conduct transactions exceeding US$314 billion annually across Africa.

Safaricom aims to position itself as Africa's foremost purpose-driven technology company by 2025. To achieve this ambition, the company recognized the necessity of transitioning from conventional, monolithic infrastructures to a cloud-native framework based on containerization and microservices, allowing for improved flexibility and a solid foundation to meet its evolving digital needs.

Having already relied on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a dependable and adaptable Linux environment, along with Red Hat Satellite for infrastructure management, Safaricom sought an open source solution for containerization. Initially, the organization utilized upstream Kubernetes but encountered instability and delays in bug resolution that hampered its operational efficiency. As a result, Safaricom opted for Red Hat OpenShift, recognized as the leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, known for its production-ready quality and carrier-grade reliability, alongside enterprise-level support.

Working closely with systems integrator Copy Cat Group and the Red Hat team, Safaricom rolled out the platform and formulated a strategic roadmap for application modernization. This initiative included synchronizing efforts across the company’s security, application development, and platform teams.

Currently, Red Hat OpenShift serves as the backbone of Safaricom's IT infrastructure, managing all its containerized applications and supporting roughly 70% of its tier 1 and tier 2 applications. The company is transitioning much of its operations to Red Hat OpenShift on bare-metal systems to enhance control, improve economic efficiency, and enable more flexible scalability. The advantages Safaricom has realized thus far include enhanced customer experiences, improved platform stability, accelerated time-to-market, increased automation, greater scalability, and fortified security.

Safaricom is exploring opportunities to extend these benefits into its network domain, including its 5G core, by broadening its Red Hat OpenShift implementation. The team is currently working on a proof-of-concept to outline and refine the onboarding process prior to scaling to include the entire team and additional applications.