Deutsche Bank democratizes application development with centralized platform

Deutsche Bank has embraced digital transformation by standardizing and streamlining developer access to compute capacity and other application resources to reach markets more quickly. Its new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Fabric, uses microservices and container capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux and managed using Red Hat Ansible Tower.

Benefits:

• Cut end-to-end application development time from 6-9 months to 2-3 weeks
• Simplified DevOps collaboration with flexible integration and agile approach
• Optimized use and costs of datacenter and cloud capacity with microservices, containers, and cloudbursting

Platform complexity restricts efficient development

As a leading financial services provider for private, corporate, and fiduciary clients, Deutsche Bank has embraced the positive trends of digital transformation. By challenging traditional business approaches, the bank sought to enhance digital customer experiences — a goal directly tied to enhancing its developer experience.

“We’re focusing on shortening our development cycles so we can get products in front of our customers more quickly,” said Tom Gilbert, global head of cloud, application, and integration platforms at Deutsche Bank. “A need for greater agility is directing the industry to microservices, containers, and public cloud, and shifting the focus from infrastructure to ideas.”

But restrictive infrastructure specialization made integration difficult and application development slow. Managing thousands of servers and databases hindered growth and adoption of more agile technology. Many operating systems were being used across multiple datacenters.

The bank saw that a new, cloud-based approach was needed to support not only its current business, but also future data needs.

Deutsche Bank also wanted to support a more innovative, DevOps approach to replace its traditional waterfall processes and keep pace with rapid, iterative digital innovation. To gain the scale and flexibility needed, the bank sought to establish a PaaS that would streamline development and management, reduce risk, and support more agile work across all of its business units.

Open source technology supports global application development

To build its strategic as-a-Service platform, Deutsche Bank sought an open source solution. After years of success with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the bank added Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Ansible Tower to build Fabric, a containerized, microservices-based application development platform at the bank.

“Red Hat offered the combination of open source with vendor support, patching, and management — all of the things that we need in a regulated business,” said Gilbert. “The shift from virtual machines to containers, and traditional applications to microservices, is a big one. We needed a partner that could help us build our deployment capabilities and train our global developer base so we could get maximum value from our investment.”

Fabric runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux in several datacenters and in the bank’s Microsoft Azure public cloud environment. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform provides support for container- and microservices-based development, scaling compute and performance capacity from dedicated servers to cloud resources as needed. Both solutions are deployed and maintained using Red Hat Ansible Tower, a framework that automates and standardizes IT at enterprise scale.

Deutsche Bank’s developers and infrastructure teams worked with Red Hat Consulting to deploy and learn about OpenShift. “We enjoyed working with them. They helped us educate thousands of developers worldwide on how to develop cloud-native applications, and they’ve helped our infrastructure teams get used to this new technology and integrate it into the bank’s platforms,” said Gilbert.

Fabric hosts systems and tools for every application development team at the bank, from the retail group’s application programming interfaces (APIs) to internal HR and employee survey systems. In addition, Fabric offers elastic, on-demand compute to support tasks like daily risk calculations, which require large volumes of resources across data processing, disaster recovery, and acceptance and performance testing.

After two years, the platform is now running more than 3,100 projects in more than 15 environments, with 6,000 active monthly users. Releases every two weeks incorporate customer and user feedback to adjust features and performance.

Its successful creation of a DevOps-ready, container-based, global development platform earned Deutsche Bank a 2019 Red Hat Innovation Award.

Faster resource access speeds service time to market

Fabric offers global, standardized compute and other development resources across infrastructure providers through APIs to help Deutsche Bank’s developers work more efficiently. Developers can create their own container images and make them available in the platform. Instead of 6-9 months, applications now go from proof of concept (POC) to production in 2-3 weeks. Red Hat Ansible Tower automates provisioning, testing, and other routine tasks, saving the company months of engineering work and mitigating risk of errors during upgrades and maintenance.

Agile and DevOps practices simplify collaboration

To support its digital transformation, Deutsche Bank has embraced DevOps and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) approaches to developing at scale — supported by the flexibility of Ansible Tower and OpenShift Container Platform.

Integration and scalability are key to expanding these collaborative processes and taking advantage of the best ideas and code. “Instead of a hosted platform, microservices let us use elastic cloud resources to scale on demand,” said Boyle. “With Ansible and OpenShift, whether it’s a management report or a piece of data, once a service exists, we just need to expose it to other functions and applications for it to be reused.”

To keep these collaborative systems secure, Red Hat helps Deutsche Bank deploy the latest patches and updates to protect its Red Hat infrastructure from threats and vulnerabilities.

Containers and cloud help teams do more with less

Streamlining resource access has helped Deutsche Bank optimize its use of datacenter and cloud capacity, saving time, money, and resources.

Dense, container- and microservices-based infrastructure not only requires fewer staff to manage but also less hardware to run than VM-based infrastructure. By adopting cloud compute and running more workloads per physical server, Deutsche Bank anticipates saving millions of euros year over year.

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