DevOps: what it is, what it does and the benefit to banks

DevOps is a collaborative practice at the center of organizational transformation that requires partnership across teams, the adoption of automation and consistent delivery paths for all applications.

Financial institutions have realized the way to scale DevOps is by building a coded enterprise. By collaborating through code groups with different languages and goals, everyone works together.

The three most common reasons local and regional banks are adopting DevOps is for security, efficiency, and application reliability. The responsibility and even accountability for security is rapidly shifting in the direction of DevOps engineers, as they have a view into the broad architecture of the processes and systems used to deploy microservices.

Developing a secure operation

Going forward, DevOps engineers and DevSecOps processes are going to be even more accountable for security. This trend should be a strong consideration, as DevSecOps also makes application deployments, operations, and service monitoring easier, and more secure.

When designing a new distributed system or refactoring/enhancing a monolithic application into microservices, think about the business app and processes by which each microservice communicates with other microservices. With that picture in mind, it makes more sense to position the identities at that microservice level. The benefits are:

• It is easier to understand the distributed application process, as that typically does not change as frequently.
• It makes the most out of container orchestration agility because we don't need to restrict certain microservices to offer certain nodes.
• It enables platforming, as the identities abstract the host identity that they are running on, whether a container, virtual machine, etc.

Software is vital

For banks, the most common driver we are seeing now is that a cornerstone application will get moved to a cloud environment. In the Digital Revolution, timelines for product delivery and information analysis are slim. Customers set the pace by consuming products and information on-demand their way. This places immense pressure on banks to deliver continuously and reliably to satisfy the rapidly escalating demand for all types of services. Software is the center of the business universe, vital to all aspects of operations. Building and reliably delivering software is now vital to short and long-term success.

As banks continue to maintain and modernize older applications, they are also creating and delivering new applications that in the sum total, can wear out their staff and budgets while increasing technical and process complexities between organizations.

In the digital economy, failure to deliver, delivering the wrong solutions, or delayed delivery greatly affects organizations' ability to satisfy required business outcomes. Forrester tells us that a significant portion of technology spend is devoted to software engineering infrastructure. The blend of workloads, applications and broad access to the resources paired with consistent delivery methods to support software development is vital. How technology is used is as equally important as to the methods and processes for creating and delivering software code.

Managed services

Most development teams have limited visibility across and within their software production; the coding and delivery processes. Visibility is paramount and getting theprocess data into the hands of key stakeholders is critical. Lead-time, deployment frequency, MTTR, and change failure data enabled with a complete and automated delivery and a mapping of the value-stream can provide great value to the enterprise.

A very powerful and proven method for companies to access and wrap their arms around the data and constraint resolution is through DevOps managed services. These services provide real-time visibility into the integrated technical-development operations processes. Data is generated from the use of hardware and software systems in response to the actions of the contributors in the value-stream from code design to release and into production.

DevOps managed services help organizations identify vulnerable process areas to remedy and improve suspect code and provide feedback for continuous improvement. Code scanning detection also helps identify code weak points and anomalies and improvement, providing improvement assurance. When there are fewer issues, the value-stream operates more efficiently, placing less stress on the contributors, including testing processes and the infrastructure they leverage to produce and reliably deliver.

Eliminating alert fatigue

Anyone who's been in the DevOps space is probably familiar with alert fatigue. At the beginning of a DevOps transformation, engineers set up as many monitors as they can to catch issues before they happen, or to understand when things are happening. The next thing that happens is that their inbox is getting flooded with all these alerts and, suddenly everything becomes less meaningful and no one is reacting to anything, which is essentially the same as not having any monitoring in the first place.

It's a big problem and finding the balance between making sure everything is captured and not overloading everybody that's responding to these issues is a key DevOps transformational issue. Managers quickly have to fix the problem of engineers being woken up at three o'clock in the morning and then looking into something that's actually a false positive. Managers need the right tools and processes to efficiently catch meaningful events and only alerting people when it's absolutely necessary.

One way to clearly quantify alert fatigue is to look at the number of alerts per person, and the frequency and timing of the alerts. DevOps leaders can use a kanban, a visual method for seeing what work has been completed and what is still needed. A kanban identifies bottlenecks and helps to promote efficiency so the project can move forward.

Eliminating alert fatigue is a process of continuous improvement, but ultimately, you will end up not only with meaningful alerts, but an efficient DevOps.