Corporate Investment Banking

Company Description and Problem

One of Africa’s largest bank’s Corporate and Investment Banking ( division houses an intraday liquidity management system that reports into the South African Reserve Bank ( daily The transactions here play a significant role in keeping the South African economy running.

This greenfield implementation required various parts of the bank to collaborate and deploy the system using engineering best practice of which Infrastructure as Code ( was the foundation The system uptime needed to be assured by the operations team Should an incident take place, the team was required to resolve the problem within a twenty minute window.

The main issue faced by the bank was the time it took to deploy the base infrastructure as well as the application itself

Solution

Collocating various teams within the bank was a challenging task but was easily achieved by running Dojos which accelerated the development of the pipeline Disraptor’s Head of Cloud and DevOps, Trevlin Pillay, collocated various parts of the bank into one space reducing potential process delays that are inherit in larger organisations.

At Disraptor, infrastructure as code is a foundational component to achieving DevOps and ensuring a quicker time to recovery The first step was enabling the provisioning of virtual machines by the developers as opposed to infrastructure teams Once a virtual machine was created, it was automatically bootstrapped using the base configuration which installed all necessary components required to run the application like the web server and all its dependencies.

During the process there was various acceptance testing performed to ensure the infrastructure code achieved what it was intended to Once all checks were passed, the application was deployed using a pipeline that made use of a custom library written to mimic human intervention which allowed for an end to end automation.

Outcome

Once the above solution was deployed, the system deployment time dropped from 1-2 weeks down to 20 minutes.

The learning that was achieved by all members involved was exponential Infrastructure engineers learnt about infrastructure as code and application developers learnt about low latency networking across data centres.

This initiative caught the attention of international companies and the team was invited to talk about the journey at an IAC conference in Chicago (See link to conference talk https://www youtube com/watch?v=vetndiMaLpU)

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest
Tumblr

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *