Don’t Just Keep Up: Stay Ahead of the Curve Through Automation

Today, consumers can address most banking tasks in a streamlined and frictionless manner. With just the click of a
button, consumers can, for example, transfer money between accounts, deposit checks, and freeze a lost or stolen debit
card. To keep up with customer expectations and interaction preferences, retail banks need to quickly launch reliable
environments in which to develop consistently, iterate quickly, and shorten the feedback loop for customers and
developers.

A large global retail bank recognized how manual development and deployment processes caused inefficiencies for its
developers. The company turned to the experts at Stelligent, who excel at helping customers achieve complete automation
of their environments, to learn how it could automate its infrastructure and application deployment processes on Amazon
Web Services (AWS).

Manual Processes: Less Time Spent Innovating and More Time Spent Frustrated

Having already deployed business-critical applications on AWS, the bank understood AWS was integral to the company’s
ability to digitally transform and drive customer success. A key motivation for using AWS was to enable developers to
deploy testing and production environments rapidly. But the company’s intentions didn’t line up with its approach, as
AWS resources were provisioned manually and inconsistently.

Developers were often kept waiting for weeks to retain a fully provisioned AWS environment ready for testing and
development. Rather than submit a new environment request, teams often resorted to retaining environments from previous
testing and development for net-new development work. Further, the company’s development and production environments
were both manually configured and were thus inconsistent in look and design. Developers would test on development
environments and when they’d move code to production environments, they would encounter errors and environment
inconsistencies such as different configurations and different packages being used. Developers lost time, cycles, and
patience simply working to correct environment issues and couldn’t devote as much effort to application testing,
development, and deployment.

The result? Higher costs, longer development cycles, slower feedback loops, and lost opportunities to drive additional
value for customers.

How Stelligent Created Company-Wide Automation Using
Chef on AWS

By embedding with the company’s development team and working side-by-side, Stelligent became intimately familiar with
the challenges the developers faced and made many recommendations for how the company could achieve a fully managed,
fully automated environment.

Stelligent designed an entire networking infrastructure for the customer and codified development environments to launch
with a click of a button. The team also created a massive enterprise-grade Chef infrastructure deployment platform
capable of managing upwards of 10,000 nodes. The Chef platform manages the customer’s entire AWS infrastructure,
including development, testing, staging, and production environments; everything is managed by the Chef server. All the
configuration on the servers are configured by Chef. Many AWS services are used in the automation process, including:

• 
  Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides the company compute power and instances on which they run their
  environments
  
• 
  AWS CloudFormation manages and provisions AWS resources in a consistent and predictable fashion. A developer uses AWS
  CloudFormation to specify the size and type of Amazon EC2 instance they’d like to use and then Chef defines the EC2
  instance internal configuration and executes scripts to install components
  onto the Amazon EC2 instance
  
• 
  Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides large-scale file storage
  
• 
  AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) securely controls
  user access to various AWS resources
  
• 
  Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) provisions a logically isolated section of
  AWS enabling the company to have complete control over its virtual networking environment. All VPCs, associated subnets,
  and route tables are defined in code
  that is checked in and committed to a central version control repository. Any changes to be made have to go through
  code, committed to the repository,
  and then executed through an automated process

Ruby is used for general purpose scripting and orchestration-layer implementation, and Hudson, an open source continuous
integration tool written in Java, runs self-service components implemented by Stelligent. Hudson provides users a single
pane of glass to execute automated tasks, such as pushing new Chef cookbook changes to Chef Server, launching new
development environments, and running Continuous Integration builds for the various Chef cookbooks and libraries.

Delighting Internal Teams and Customers Through Rapid Deployment Cycles

Thanks to Stelligent’s automation of its entire environment, the bank began to fully realize the benefits of using AWS
and drove significant improvements for the business, including:

• Reducing the lead time to launch an environment from 720 hours to 2 hours
• Significantly shortening coding, testing,
  developing, and deployment cycles and bringing products to market faster
• Eliminating manual developer tasks to allow more focus on developing
  value-added features to drive customer
  satisfaction and engagement
• Improving infrastructure governance and limiting risk
  by designing automation while adhering to AWS best practices
  and prohibiting developers from making manual changes to network components
• Providing instant ability to scale up environments
  to meet market demands and scale down environments to eliminate
  idle resources and reduce costs
• Designing for high availability and eliminating
  any single point of failure within the architecture
• Shortening customer feedback loops to be able to
  rapidly improve the company’s products and services
• Improving end-customers’ experiences by ensuring applications
  are thoroughly tested in the right environments prior
  to deployment and eliminating application errors

The bank can now confidently focus on being at the forefront of digital innovation on behalf of customers rather than
struggling to keep up with industry trends.