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A DevOps Case Study: CI/CD as a Service, Serverless, and AWS

Meet Ryan and Ernie after their presentation at Contino Booth #230

Contino is working with a large retail banking institution in the US. Embedded in the bank are legacy operating models, technologies and practices. After years of data center expansion, vendor driven software development and various data incidents, the client decided to adopt more automated practices and tooling to allow for secure software deployment to the AWS cloud. The intent is to allow for various development teams to operate independent of the enterprise pipeline backbone, and integrate/onboard applications into the pipeline when ready for a rigorous testing and inspection process while deploying to the AWS cloud.

Through the Contino dual-delivery model, the teams validated and improved the AWS pipeline strategy. The validation and elaboration allowed for the dual-delivery team to scope tightly on assuring security by employing a security concept referred to as the “clean room”. The clean room, as well as the larger pipeline, treats the individual tooling options as commodities and contributors towards the ultimate goal of creating a seamless enterprise pipeline that is simple for contributing teams to leverage. Adding and removing tools to the clean room and pipeline now becomes a matter of minutes, rather than weeks. Essentially the clean room is the enterprise means to create DevOps for DevOps. In short, we created CI/CD as a Service, using Serverless AWS technology such that using the pipeline is based on a subscription / broker model for both service consumption and activity rendering.

With the impact of lifting the enterprise capabilities and technology shifting from private to AWS, there was mindful intent paid towards the holistic enterprise architecture to support such an uplift. Contino worked with the client to model and review all areas of impact, including the business, application and technology tiers using an industry standard Architecture Modeling Language (The Open Group). This view uniquely provides a measured and progressive view of how security, AWS, DevOps and business operations are all integrated to drive for sustainable digital transformation in a highly regulated bank. This view allowed for legacy concerns to be remediated in a modern context and brokered meaningful conversations to handle typical objections that prevent many teams from more simply migrating and consuming AWS public cloud services at scale.

Infrastructure and services that historically took days or weeks to provision can now be tested and deployed ephemerally and in minutes, allowing for more rapid testing and much tighter feedback loops to the product delivery teams.