As a leading bank serving private, corporate, and fiduciary clients, 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, to help DevOps teams work and collaborate efficiently, with on-demand resource access. With faster, more iterative production launches and more cost-effective resource use, the bank has set a new standard for rapid application development and deployment using the latest technologies.
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. “Application teams were running single applications on whole VMs [virtual machines],” said Emma Perkins, PaaS portfolio manager at Deutsche Bank.
The bank saw that a new, cloud-based approach was needed to support not only its current business, but also future data needs. “We perform millions of risk calculations daily. In two years, we’ll need to be doing billions of calculations each day. So the days of just buying servers to put in a datacenter has gone,” said Nick Boyle, program director for enterprise risk technology, Investment Banking, at Deutsche Bank.
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. “Open source expands our possibilities. It’s a rich ecosystem with so much value to use and contribute back to, allowing us to work faster and focus on our business problems,” said Gilbert.
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.