A leading UK bank wanted to improve end-user experience and drive new offerings through their 100+ business-critical applications. The key goals were to increase release frequency, reduce deployment time, and achieve zero downtime for applications by moving to Amazon Web Services (AWS), as well as enhance the quality and security of customer-facing applications.
Implementing a central DevOps platform was not feasible owing to the long lead time involved. With application teams focused on creating business-critical capabilities, they had limited bandwidth to address all the DevOps recommendations. Further, the DevOps tooling expertise across application teams was limited.
Key Challenges
- Time-to-market was impacted due to lack of end-to-end automation.
- Inconsistent usage of DevOps tools and practices resulted in high technical debt
- Disparate DevOps solutions across lines of business (LOBs) and multiple continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines meant increased cost and maintenance effort
- Manual infrastructure provisioning and environment management led to in longer wait times
Ready to experience?
TALK TO EXPERTS
The Solution
A combination of CICD automation and focused assistance from DevOps experts helped achieve the goals.
- A multi-stage approach (starting with Near DevOps and then evolving to True DevOps) was adopted to minimize risk for business-critical applications moving to cloud
- Fully automated and reusable CICD pipelines created with embedded continuous quality and security practices, such as code quality scans (SonarQube), SAST (Checkmarx), SCA (NexusIQ), test automation (TOSCA, Selenium, Cucumber, PyTest), and DAST (Invicti)
- DevOps solution to 100+ applications rolled out by a central ‘tiger team’ of DevOps specialists
- Infrastructure automation for 30+ application patterns achieved using reusable and scalable Terraform Stack and SuperStack modules
Rollout of DevOps solution based on careful considerations of the client’s landscape ensured a successful implementation and improved outcomes
- Adopting a multi-stage DevOps approach and timely guidance from dedicated DevOps experts minimized risk during transformation
- DevOps automation for business-critical applications led to increased release frequency and faster time-to-market of new features, giving the client a competitive advantage
- Reusable DevOps solution and standardization of tools enabled cost savings and reduced the maintenance effort
- Automation reduced deployment time for customer-facing applications, thus improving the end-user experience
- Fully automated CICD pipelines reduced manual effort and errors, thus saving time during release in addition to lowering overall technical debt
Benefits
50% increase in release frequency
90% reduction in average deployment time. Zero downtime with rolling deployments resulted in better business user experience
Direct savings of 120K USD with improved automation for the 100+ applications
Fully automated CICD pipelines resulted in savings of approximately 4,500 person hours within the first year
~95% reduction in base AWS environment provisioning due to infrastructure as a code approach
