Welcome to the cloud-native age
Few industries have been transformed by the cloud era like financial services. Countless new entrants have seized on the opportunities presented by new technology, revolutionizing the sector and changing customer expectations. Now, whether you’re an established bank or an early-stage start-up, you need the agility to bring new features to market faster than any of your rivals.
GitOps offers multiple benefits for businesses in the financial services sector. It is proven to increase developer velocity, enabling you to go to market faster. And it does so while improving security, stability and compliance. To explore its potential in your business, there is no better partner than Weaveworks, the GitOps pioneers and the global leaders in GitOps technologies and services.
One of the things I really find beneficial is the production insight that Weaveworks brings to the table, which allows us to make important decisions with confidence. That, for us, is pivotal. Wen Yeow, Senior Engineer/Technical Project Lead, National Australia Bank
The Kubernetes revolution
Originally developed by Google in 2014, Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating the deployment and management of applications. As the pace of fintech innovation has increased, Kubernetes has been at the heart of the sector’s evolution, providing start-ups and global banks including Monzo, HSBC, Starling and Capital with flexible, cloud-native infrastructure.
For fintech businesses, Kubernetes is fast becoming the go-to technology. But while it provides the underlying building blocks for scaling your applications, it is not a panacea. You still need a system for reliably speeding up the process of testing, deploying and managing new applications on a reliable and scalable infrastructure often spanning multiple cloud and hybrid set ups. That’s where GitOps comes in.
Going faster with GitOps
At its heart, GitOps delivers increased developer velocity. Already used in production by financial institutions across the globe, GitOps brings together two established open-source platforms: container management system Kubernetes and version control system Git.
The result is a combination of technology and best practices that fintech businesses can use to offer a self-service platform for their developers. Free of the need for constant operational support, developers can test and deploy their code faster – and all without compromising on stability, security or compliance.
Partner with the GitOps pioneers
The best way to explore the benefits of GitOps will be to work directly with us. As the creators of the model, nobody knows more about it than we do – and nobody offers a more advanced GitOps experience than Weave GitOps Enterprise.
One of the most sought after features in Weave GitOps Enterprise is Workspaces. In Kubernetes, namespaces are great for making efficient use of Kubernetes resources across teams, but enabling them and managing them through the command line is cumbersome and can be error prone. Weave GitOps Workspaces build on and create secure namespaces to deliver multi-tenancy and application portability that allows teams to immediately start shipping from Git.
GitOps has allowed us to create a self-service platform for engineers so they can concentrate on delivering business value through innovation, without the full need for Platform Team assistance. Steve Wade, Platform Lead, Mettle
Built for the public cloud, on-premise installations and hybrid architecture, it makes adopting GitOps seamless and straightforward, regardless of your underlying infrastructure. With investors including Amazon, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Sonae Investment Management and Capital Partners Management, we offer a range of commercial support options that can be tailored to the needs of your organization.
Fully secure and fully compliant
Development, especially CICD pipelines can offer a tempting attack vector for intruders. GitOps improves the security of several elements on the development pipeline, from the code itself (and that includes anything else you keep in code, such as policy and config) to the process by which you make changes to it. With GitOps, you can boost security right along the pipeline, while at the same time boosting the speed at which you can react if the worst happens. (Watch a recent talk from GitHub on this topic.)
But in fintech, security alone is not enough. Compliance is critical too. GitOps workflows automatically generate full audit logs of all cluster changes telling you who did what, and when. These audit trails can be used to meet SOC 2 compliance and ensure stability.
In the Weave GitOps Enterprise, the GitOps Policy Manager enables you to set up rules that govern who can make changes to the cluster. Role-based access control (RBAC) is provided within Git, however you can also add your own custom policies using the OPA framework.
GitOps is a perfect fit as we have, with no extra effort or tooling, a fully auditable, permanent record of what is being merged to the repo and deployed into our production environments. Garry Wilson, Site Reliability Team Lead, Curve
Innovation without interruption
Service interruptions can be costly in fintech. That’s because customers care about where they keep their money – how secure it is and how easily they can access it. In the face of an outage, many may consider leaving the platform.
GitOps improves system stability in several ways. By automating the deployment and management of new code, it reduces the incidence of human error. By constantly monitoring the state of the running system, its software agents check for drift from the desired state, as specified in Git. If drift does begin to take place, alerts are sent and rollbacks can be undertaken instantly. Should disaster strike, the entire cluster on which the system is running can be destroyed and brought back into service in a matter of minutes. All of which means increased uptime and much-reduced mean time to recovery (MTTR) after an outage – critical metrics for fintech customer retention.
We would recommend WKP which allowed us to own and manage our infrastructure while building a consistent technical bridge to a client-facing cloud presence. Having worked with the Weaveworks client success team for our cluster deployments, service testing, specific use cases to deploy configuration changes and management of in-place upgrades, we are genuinely impressed with their organizational dedication to our success.”Lance Allred, Director of Infrastructure, Datascan
Start the journey today
Weave GitOps Enterprise enables fintech businesses to innovate faster and benefit from application portability across all the infrastructure they use, from bare metal to public clouds and hybrid environments. Crucially, it enables you to specify, audit and control who can change what, for improved security, compliance and availability.
To learn more about how we could help make you more productive, please get in touch.
Whitepaper: GitOps Boosts Innovation in Financial Services
With direct reference to real-life case studies in the financial services sector, we explain why innovation is critical and why GitOps is uniquely positioned to help new and established banks thrive.
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