The Client

One of the largest banks in North America, and the world (based on market capitalization), with about 90 billion USD in assets. The bank and its subsidiaries have over 85,000 employees and over 25 million clients worldwide, with more than 2,300 branches across North America alone, providing hundreds of services under three main business lines: two retail and one wholesale banking. Their services include digital banking, lending, investing, asset management, insurance, and more.

The Challenge

The  client  had accumulated  an overwhelming amount  of technology, facing all  associated challenges- in particular business siloes left unstandardized, fragmented across business units. There was a critical need to create a single point of entry for this diverse technology collection, along with a deployment model that was easily accessible and scalable by  both developers and operations alike. Cloud-like agility needed to be maintained while controlling all processes across hybrid infrastructures and stacks.

The  client  was looking  to provide their  users with an integrated  solution for creating development  and production environments, on demand, on public and private clouds – while maintaining control of the stack and existing infrastructure and making the introduction of new technologies possible, preventing future fragmentation. The main challenges were to  provide environment templates and a web-based catalog for the developers that would allow them to easily test new applications and deploy them in production, without requiring them to have intimate knowledge of the specific technologies that could comprise the stack and environment.

Technical Use Case

Cloudify set out to help the banking team build a standardized selection of ‘certified’ blueprints, that the client would be  able to provide their 10+ lines of business, essentially building a simple web-based catalog for one-click actions.  This catalog gave their in-house developers a simple way to configure and provision environments on demand to test their hundreds of applications and rollout new services without time-consuming procurement cycles or IT provisioning bottlenecks. Since the blueprints are written in simple YAML, developers were also able to modify and customize the blueprints to match the configuration needed for each particular environment, enabling the level of flexibility a human operator would be able to provide.

Powerful Orchestration

Cloudify gets hard to work behind the scenes, provisioning and configuring VMs across hybrid environments and stacks (virtualized,  non-virtualized, containerized, and non-containerized environments), and orchestrates each environment to the user’s specification to enable a significant reduction in deployment times (often from  weeks to hours)- and to manage and monitor environments, providing scaling and healing on demand, as well as easy automatic patches and upgrades. Cloudify replaces most of the manual labor (and the costs usually attached) reducing the need of having the IT team respond to each developer request for new resources. The work of the Cloudify team enabled technology standardization across the entire multinational corporation and all lines of business, ultimately lowering the bank’s costs by 40%, enabling them to deploy over 5000 nodes on OpenStack in production, and helped them introduce over 50 new digital services and technologies to their internal end-users and clientele, including seven new platforms, all in under one year.

Why Cloudify

CI/CD pipelines in today’s cloud environment are complicated – and can become a serious bottleneck when dealing with multi-cloud. Existing automation tools cover different parts of the stack, leaving inconsistencies, siloed operations… and each pipeline stitched to a specific environment forcing users to recreate them time and again. Larger organizations like

this multi national bank are left with slow and painful manual processes when updating/ scaling environments across multiple cloud infrastructures. Cloudify brings together new and existing infrastructures, networking, and security tools, creating reusable environment blueprints.  With Cloudify in action, every possible environment change can be seamlessly applied to ALL new and existing applications.

As  an early-adopter  of TOSCA, the leading  cloud standard templating  language that enables support  of existing technologies while simultaneously  providing hooks for any future technologies, Cloudify’s  open source orchestration engine quickly demonstrates not only how to save costly developer time, but also how to reduce operational expenses in a short time frame.

The Outlook

Cloudify  will continue  to power the innovation  and growth behind the bank’s  constantly evolving business needs,  as well as provide detailed security  and access control through multi-tenancy,  enabling better segregation of roles and responsibilities, and lines of business.

Head to the website to learn more about Cloudify, or feel free to schedule a demo by clicking here.