No matter which industry you belong to, DevOps is a must. Let’s see some famous DevOps success stories in financial companies. No doubt, DevOps is here to stay.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. DevOps is making its impact on almost every software powered company these days, and that being said, when it came to companies in the finance domain, they were perhaps the slowest to embrace DevOps. But it is safe to say that they are currently leading the digital innovation in this sphere of cloud-native technology. The initial hindrance towards DevOps in financial institutions was because of the principles they adhere towards governance, security, compliance, and regulatory regulations. If you think correctly, higher customer engagement and continuous transactions make the industry one of the busiest, and naturally requires uninterrupted infrastructure. The reason is the same, DevOps implementation helps companies develop fast, fail fast, and learn fast so they can fulfill customer expectations and deliver features faster to market than their competitors. When it comes to the finance sector, the technology has not evolved much as many companies assume that it is risky to embrace DevOps rather than beneficial. There is a lot of legacy code and old methodologies still in practice; financial institutions are lagging in digital innovations, and this can be nullified by adopting DevOps. Unlike other industries, regulated industries imply several challenges Strong restrictions on secured networks Fine-grained audit trails Strong ACLs models Full lifecycle governance Integration with 3rd parties More than anything else, security and compliance are top concerns in financial companies. Many of the executives argue against modernizing legacy software development and DevOps practices. DevOps practices are, in fact, viewed as risk factors to security, and the increased frequency of software releases in DevOps is seen as a threat to governance and regulatory controls. The 2020 State of Database DevOps report by Redgate shows that respondents in Financial Services report the highest levels of Database DevOps adoption this year – with proportionally higher rates than any other sector. Well, that is an interesting sign of financial sector maturity in terms of digital innovation. Image source credit: Redgate In 2015, Barclays announced that it is adopting DevOps for its digital transformation journey. Now, Barclays processes payments, which equate to around 30% of the UK’s Gross Domestic Product. The developers’ morale and quality of code increased because of DevOps and the leadership team at Barclays credited DevOps with significantly reducing the complexity of their codes, which has allowed them to reduce delivery risk and, ultimately, improve the quality of their services. A journey that affirms you don’t have to be too big to use Kubernetes. They started their cloud-native DevOps journey by splitting the massive monolith application into smaller microservices. To spin up these microservices, they used Ansible, Terraform, and Jenkins and to deploy these microservices as a whole unit (as shown in the image). Then they suddenly started to experience some of the scaling issues with Microservices. So, they didn’t get any of the microservices benefits. Hence they started looking for ways to get out of this complexity by shifting their focus from machine-oriented to application-oriented architecture. They chose Kubernetes as the abstraction layer along with AWS, not worrying about where the containers are running, and this is how they were able to manage microservices and unlocked the velocity of microservices. They also chose Kubernetes from a security perspective and to specify how the applications should run. Now they run around 80+ microservices in production with the help of Kubernetes:) Watch and learn how they did it in this video ‘Running Kubernetes in production at Lunar Way by Kasper Nissen.’ – ‘Two years in production with Kubernetes’ A conventional bank running its real business on such a young technology? No way, are you kidding me? Nope, I am not kidding. Italy’s banking group, Intesa Sanpaolo, has made this transition. These are banks who still run their ATM networks on 30-year-old mainframe technology, and embracing the hottest trend & tech is nearly unbelievable. Even though ING, the banking and financial corporation, changed the way the banks were seen by upgrading itself with Kubernetes and DevOps practices very early in the game, there was still a stigma with adopting Kubernetes in the highly regulated and controlled environments like Healthcare, Banks, etc.
