Digital Transformation at Santander: How Platform Engineering is Revolutionizing Cloud Infrastructure

This article describes how Santander implemented Catalyst, a platform engineering solution built on AWS, to revolutionize its cloud infrastructure management and accelerate digital transformation.

• Reduced infrastructure provisioning time from 90 days to hours or minutes
• Catalyst platform built on Amazon EKS with Crossplane for multi-cloud resource management
• Implemented GitOps using ArgoCD for continuous deployment and synchronization
• Centralized policy management using Open Policy Agent for compliance and security
• Generative AI agents stack integrated Amazon Bedrock, S3, KMS, and custom IAM policies
• Modern data platform reduced monthly data environment provisioning tickets by 3,000
• AI agent implementation time reduced from 105 days to 24 hours
• Consolidated over 100 pipelines into single control plane
• Proof of concept preparation time decreased from 90 days to 1 hour
• Promoted automation and self-service culture among development teams

Catalyst demonstrates how platform engineering enables operational efficiency, standardization, and security while supporting diverse workloads from traditional systems to AI and legacy modernization.