Prior to BBD joining the team, the container runtime platform was merely for running customer containers in a secure and compliant way. After BBD’s involvement, the team has since been able to adopt more cloud-native technologies such as ArgoCD and Crossplane, to improve the feature readiness of the platform and provide tooling to improve the customers experience as well as align the team for building a fully-fledged internal developer platform.
Prior to BBD’s involvement, the requirement was running a Kubernetes-native Machine Learning (ML) platform.
Objectives
- Leverage our platform experience to assist client team
- Deliver and extend required features on existing Kubernetes platform
- Introduce new cloud-native technologies
- Upskill client platform teams
- Push the adoption of platform engineering principles and importance of having an internal developer platform
Benefits
- Improved overall delivery time of software solutions across business
- Secure, highly available and resilient core container platform
- Improved time to market on new features and software
- Created a new deployment model that has been standardised across diffeernt client teams using GitOps principles
- Fully managed platform on which additional platforms are built on top of. Allows for each client team to not have to reinvent the wheel
- Seamless and fast deployment process as decreased cognitive load for client developers
- Embedded monitoring, telemetry, metrics and altering
- Feature readiness using industry standard cloud-native technologies
Overview of the solution
Replacing core legacy systems are a bank’s worst nightmare and many will do so in a “big bang” project, built separately from the legacy application. Due to the cost of legacy projects and many legacy replacements failing, bank leadership are loathe to undertake projects of this scope. Hence at BBD we look at how we can evolve legacy applications, which may take a bit longer, but deliver results which are less disruptive and with a higher success rate.
BBD is utilising new technologies to transform this bank’s existing retail banking platform system. This will allow for the banking platform’s user interface to transform by deploying new preferred technologies, such as HTML5 and Angular, in a phased approach. Back-end components are also being evolved as part of the scope. With many banks moving to a digital, self-service banking model – the app BBD is morphing could also be utilised for web, mobile and digital instances.
Where possible, BBD is reusing existing services to ensure cost efficiencies. Layered architecture, in line with best practices, are being implemented in such a way that front-ends can be decoupled from the service layer. Using multiple front-end applications to consume these newly developed services have resulted in standardised business capabilities across multiple channels.
Approach
Integrating into the client’s existing platform team, BBD’s platform experts first assisted in improving and adopting new features on the Kubernetes-native ML platform in order to streamline deployments. Within six months, the team had developed and deployed the required features, and had the platform running smoothly.
During this process, the team took the decision to split the core platform out in order to make deployments easier and more efficient going forward. This decision did not impact the client’s customers in any way, but resulted in a new deployment model that improved the speed at which features can be delivered on the platform. At a company-level, the BBD team was able to standardise the use of this new model across numerous disparate teams.
What followed this stage of the engagement was a focus on upskilling the client’s team on the technologies, features and functionalities inherent to the platform. For this, a true DevOps approach was followed, providing tools that would make the client’s teams’ lives easier (such as monitoring, alerting and observability), all while meeting and following industry best practices.
Technology used
Throughout this project, various technologies, approaches and methodologies were leveraged alongside BBD’s experience and knowledge to best facilitate the client teams with a core internal platform and deployment model.
- Crossplane was leveraged to provide a standard way to manage cloud resources and environments
- CDK and CDK8s were utilised on the platform, providing internal teams with the tools, cloud architectures and best practices required
- After BBD’s involvement, the container platform was not just merely able to run container but was transformed into a universal, extensible cloud-native API
- With each team across the business previously deploying in a different way, ArgoCD was leveraged to provide a “golden path” which increased speed at which changes could be made to environments and deployed
- The beauty of the solution delivered lies in the reusability of the features developed as they are adaptable enough to be used in other situations where the same base platform is leveraged
Impact of BBD’s partnership
Closely partnering with our client on this project, BBD’s platform engineering team was able to transform the Kubernetes platform to allow it to be the orchestration layer and the backbone of the future internal developer platform which leverages cloud-native technologies.
