What is DevOps?

DevOps in banking is a relatively broad term, which is why sometimes it can be difficult to understand what it is a tool or something like agile methodologies or a mindset. At its core, it's an approach in software development that implies a combination of several components at once, namely tools, practices, and a collaborative mindset.

The value of DevOps adoption is that this approach automates and integrates the work of software developers and IT teams, ensuring clearer communication, focus on teamwork, as well as accelerating software development lifecycles. The main aspect in the DevOps model is breaking down tasks, collaborative work, and transparency, which makes deployments more reliable.

The DevOps concept itself appeared in 2007 as a way to solve some challenges, for example when teams work in isolation, that is, developers write the code, and the IT department is focused on deployment. DevOps became a kind of bridge that combines development and operations teams, thereby ensuring a continuous process.

All in all, DevOps is a philosophy in software development that includes a set of tools and methodologies designed to bring together developers (Devs) and operations specialists (Ops) for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).

DevOps in Banking Software Development: How Can It Make a Difference?

Speaking about DevOps in the banking industry, this approach is an effective strategy to exceed emerging demands. By applying DevOps principles and tools, financial institutions can deliver value to the market faster and safer, as well as reduce costs. The combination of different methodology, tools, and practices boosts digital transformation and has a positive impact on application releases due to useful governance, security, risk, and compliance strategies.

The financial sector is constantly evolving, therefore market and customer requirements are extremely high. This means that implementing innovation or new technologies is crucial for both industry leaders and fintech startups. And implementing DevOps practices is among the best solutions due to its effectiveness and satisfaction of the need for continuous integration, faster software delivery pipelines, and improved customer experience.

Benefits of DevOps in Banking Software Development

DevOps practices can offer a number of valuable benefits when it comes to software development, so it's not surprising that both traditional banks and new financial institutions are interested in DevOps implementation today. Key advantages of DevOps for the banking and financial services industry include:

  • Faster Delivery. The DevOps approach helps streamline operations and software development lifecycles, thereby enabling banks and firms to deliver new products and features more quickly, which also improves their competitiveness in the banking and financial services market.
  • Enhanced Security. Being a proactive approach, DevOps takes into account a wide range of aspects that concern the entire development process and beyond. This allows for expanded data security, improved protection against cyber threats, and minimized security vulnerabilities, including through the implementation of AI-driven solutions.
  • Operational Efficiency. The DevOps environment shows excellent results from an efficiency standpoint. Thanks to process automation and reduction of manual processes, DevOps supports seamless operations across teams and systems, which leads to reduced costs and more efficient use of available resources.
  • Improved Collaboration. Since DevOps involves breaking down tasks as well as setting common goals and duties, development and operations essentially become one DevOps team, which ensures clearer communication, optimizes software development, and reduces friction.
  • Greater Reliability. The DevOps methodology includes continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). This has a positive effect as it allows for frequent and controlled deployments, consequently reducing the risk of errors, and bugs can be identified and fixed faster, leading to stable and reliable desktop/mobile banking apps.
  • Enhanced Scalability. Another advantage of DevOps service is support for adaptable workflows and scalable infrastructure. This enables financial institutions to respond to market demands on time and scale according to growth and business needs.

Deliver Value And Scale Faster. Try The DevOps Philosophy For Your Projects. Contact Jappware Today!

Key DevOps Principles and Their Impact on Banking

DevOps in banking includes several core principles that distinguish this approach from traditional and sometimes outdated practices in the software development process. The use of DevOps methodology in the banking industry helps in:

Accelerating Deployment Cycles

Such banking DevOps practices as Infrastructure as Code (IaC), continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), as well as automated testing are among the most valuable methods that allow for accelerating the development process. This way, DevOps pipelines (CI/CD) provide automation in a number of aspects when it comes to build, test, and deployment processes, reducing manual tasks and enabling developers to release code changes frequently. IaC in turn automates infrastructure provisioning, allowing the development team to spin up/tear down environments on-demand for faster cycle speeds.

Reducing Downtime and Errors

Thanks to artificial intelligence, DevOps largely relies on process automation, especially for testing, monitoring, and deployment, which are extremely important in financial services. Automation allows for both minimizing errors and eliminating many manual processes, helping to avoid delays. At the same time, reducing downtime and errors leads to cost savings. Using DevOps tools such as Kubernetes, Terraform, or Ansible, fintech companies can benefit from new updates that are deployed automatically, as well as improved collaboration between development and operations teams.

Ensuring Security and Compliance

DevOps is an effective strategy to meet stringent compliance requirements while minimizing vulnerabilities and sensitive customer data breaches. By adopting Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), firms can automate software lifecycle pipelines. This contributes to reducing human errors and improves security through better-documented development and testing processes, as well as clear frameworks for application governance and risk management. Since compliance with regulatory standards is a vital task for institutions in the banking sector, implementing DevOps is one of the best solutions for ensuring regulatory compliance.

Real-World Applications of DevOps in Banking

CI/CD Pipelines in Action

Capital One is one of the largest banks that uses DevOps delivery pipelines. With automated CI/CD, the bank was able to reduce release time from one per quarter to one per day or per week or per sprint. 

Capital One uses microservices architecture to increase delivery speed without compromising quality, which includes transformation from monolithic services to automated CI/CD pipelines. By integrating security directly into the DevOps pipeline, Capital One was able to maintain a high level of security while delivering software faster.

The financial giant also uses integrations with planning systems such as Jira and Confluence. In addition, CI provides automatic builds with every commit, and CD provides automatic deployment to test environments. Adopting DevOps practices allowed the bank to deliver high-quality software and banking services faster and simplified processes.

Automated Testing for Financial Software

JP Morgan Chase is another giant in the world of financial services that uses DevOps for secure and fast deployment of financial software. The bank was able to accelerate processes, specifically transitioning from one release every two weeks to more than a thousand releases per day thanks to DevOps automation through GitLab. In addition, DevOps led to significant reductions in critical security issues in production.

The institution uses a continuous testing pipeline for development, source code control, reviews, builds, testing, QA and production deployments, as well as automatic unit tests on every commit.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

IaC means that infrastructure, such as servers, networks, storage, and databases, can be managed and provisioned automatically using code, rather than through manual work. This allows managing it using similar methods as in software development. 

Among the leaders in the financial services sector, IaC has been implemented by Barclays and Deutsche Bank. For example, the British giant applies the DevOps model and IaC for its trading platforms. The approach allowed them to increase deployment frequency from twice yearly to over a hundred times per day. At the same time, Deutsche Bank created self-service deployment pipelines that enable faster application delivery, and the adoption of the DevOps approach itself allowed them to reduce infrastructure outages by 90% over three years.

Overcoming Challenges in DevOps Adoption for Banking

The DevOps transition includes several challenges that must be addressed for the successful adoption of the DevOps approach by financial services institutions. The main challenges include:

Legacy Systems

Many institutions may still rely on legacy systems. Since such systems are often built on outdated languages, databases, and hardware, firms face insufficient scalability and flexibility of these legacy systems, which makes it difficult to implement any new features. Therefore, investing in modern systems is a must before moving to DevOps.

Security & Compliance

Protecting sensitive data is vital in financial services, given the constant emergence of new cyber threats. Institutions must ensure compliance with PCI DSS and GDPR standards and consider security concerns during any changes, deployments, and infrastructure configurations.

Skills Gaps

Since DevOps is a different approach to development and operations, financial institutions may need to find DevOps engineers and conduct training for employees to ensure the successful integration of DevOps practices into existing workflows.

Implementation Costs

DevOps reduces costs in the long term, but requires dedicated resources and budget initially. New tools, training teams, and upgrading existing infrastructure—all this can be quite expensive, especially for newcomers and small companies in the market.

Implementing DevOps in Financial Institutions

The shift to DevOps is a comprehensive process that requires rethinking workflows. The first thing that demands attention is identifying bottlenecks, as well as alignment with business goals.

It's also critical for institutions to build a cross-functional team consisting of development and operations departments. This means staff training and often upskilling. Additionally, adopting a DevOps approach in the banking sector requires investments in scalable and secure infrastructure and gradual implementation of automation instead of manual processes.

A significant role is played by alignment between regulatory compliance requirements and strategic goals that the organization plans to achieve by implementing DevOps.

The transition to a DevOps approach requires expertise and a partner. Offering custom banking software development, the Jappware team consists of experienced and skilled professionals who will help you at all stages of the transition, guaranteeing successful adoption of advanced DevOps practices in your software development process, from automating infrastructure to smooth deployment and continuous monitoring. We also pay special attention to seamless integration of DevOps pipelines into existing systems, ensuring compliance and efficiency.

Promising DevOps trends in the coming years include:

  • DevSecOps & Zero Trust Security. Integration of Zero Trust into CI/CD pipelines ensures automated security checks at every stage of development and continuous vulnerability monitoring.
  • Cloud-Native Solutions. Microservices in cloud environments are already in demand today due to containerization and implementation of hybrid solutions for risk management.
  • AIOps. AI and ML algorithms are a key tool for data analytics and forecasting, which is why AI-driven solutions are already a major trend.
  • Compliance-as-Code. CaC is an effective way to automate compliance, ensuring continuous regulatory adherence without slowing down development.
  • Platform Engineering. Self-service platforms standardize deployment processes, simplify infrastructure operations, and accelerate time-to-market for new products

Final Thoughts

DevOps methodology is an extremely effective strategy for financial institutions due to the significant acceleration of deployment cycles and automation of many processes, which reduces errors and downtime.

Implementing the DevOps philosophy in software development is one of the key aspects of the competitiveness of firms in the banking industry. DevOps enables financial institutions to respond faster to market demands, improve delivery processes, and support continuous learning.