AWS ECS Candidate Solution for Australian bank
Helping a large financial services institution move to a DevOps technology model, with delivery capabilities decentralised to accelerate transformation.
AWS ECS
Proof of concept
DevOps
Approach
Financial Services
Industry
Our customer is an Australian direct bank based in Melbourne, Victoria. It is owned by a consortium of 26 industry superannuation funds, and provides internet and mobile banking services for over 500,000 customers nationwide.
Our work was commissioned by the Enablement Team, who are responsible for building the bank’s infrastructure capability as the enterprise transitions from traditional siloed, waterfall “on-prem” IT operations to become a more agile, cloud-centric enterprise.
Business challenge
The bank has successfully developed and deployed an enterprise container platform using a variety of open source and off the shelf services.
The platform is currently managed as a central, shared service. However, the organisation has a target to move to a more DevOps inspired technology model, with technology delivery capabilities decentralised and aligned to product teams as much as possible.
As a result, they wanted to understand the potential for an alternative “lightweight” container management platform – one that was simple enough to be configured and managed by individual product teams, allowing them to build and deploy solutions autonomously, without the need to liaise with the central support team.
The Enablement Team identified that the ECS / Fargate solution appeared to meet this objective, and in order to gain an understanding of the practical and financial impact of running ECS / Fargate solution within the organisation’s ecology, sponsored a brief “learning by doing” discovery exercise.
To ensure that this exercise was practical & realistic, they chose to use the Operational Data Store (ODS) as a target workload.
Solution
The aim of the engagement was to:
- Attempt to deploy a minimum viable / proof of concept container management solution for the ODS
- Develop a Gap Analysis to understand the effort to bring the solution up to the standard where it could be deployed into a production environment (the bank operates in a highly regulated environment; and a significant amount of additional solution hardening, as well as governance, architecture and security work has to be completed before a solution can be released into production)
In order to deploy a POC container management solution, Cevo worked with the internal team to tight deadlines to provide the following deliverables:
- Successful deployment of the two ODS components in ECS Fargate
- Ability to securely request an authenticated API endpoint over SSL
- Automated provisioning of HA and self-healing infrastructure
- Zero-downtime automated deployments of application components
- Integration with enterprise logging, monitoring, and alerting tools
- Security appropriately implemented
- Orchestration of Infrastructure and application deployments using CodeCommit, CodePipeline, and CodeBuild
- Delivery of solution elements “as Code” using CloudFormation and scripting in order maximise portability and repeatability.
Outcomes
ECS Fargate in combination with AWS Tooling can provide a powerful yet simple container platform that can integrate easily with Enterprise logging, monitoring, and alerting tools.
As a result of the work with Cevo, the bank now has the confidence of knowing that ECS Fargate is a viable alternate platform, and therefore could be used to improve, or augment, the available application platforms.
The Gap Analysis puts the organisation in a position to decide whether to move forward and provide the product as an option to ODS and/or other application teams.
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