At the Unscripted:London event hosted by software delivery platform Harness this autumn, two very different British banks offered insights into the challenges and rewards of transformation. One bank, Chase UK, is cloud-native, and born during the pandemic - the other, Lloyds, is a British institution that's 259 years old.
Both banks took different paths, with Lloyds shifting to a cloud-first approach, and Chase UK moving from tools to ecosystems - and both faced unique challenges along the way.
Upgrading technology and moving to a cloud-first approach is no small task for a bank a quarter of a millennium old, explained Tony Phillips, Engineering Lead, Cloud DevOps at Lloyds Banking Group.
Philips said: "We are 250 years old and I’ve been here for 27 years, 10% of the bank’s life, which is quite terrifying. Being 250 years old, we’re highly regulated: you can name the technology, we have at least one of them.
"The technology estate is massively complex. It took 77 days, generally, to onboard a developer, which is an absolutely frightening statistic. Being a 250-year-old bank, actually getting on to cloud is something that we've had to think long and hard about. And being frank, we've had to have a couple of attempts."
With the bank adopting a new cloud-first strategy, the problem was that not enough of the technology estate was self-service, reusable assets were hard to provide, and cross-platform collaboration was difficult, Philips explained.
Philips continued: "What's the answer? An IDP (Internal Developer Portal). We typically call it one IDP, and that's the bank's strategy, to make it a unified capability that we can all consume, that we can self-serve at the point of need.
"Integration and orchestration are the hardest plays, for obvious reasons. And we in cloud DevOps are tasked as part of the 'one IDP' delivery to bring in one LBG (Lloyds Banking Group) managed pipeline. Then ultimately golden paths, which will be those reusable journeys that can be used up and down the organisation."
The team aims for a modernisation program which will see "radical change" - with critical business processes and important business services migrating out to the cloud.
"Essentially, we're hoping Mr. Developer or Mr. Engineer comes into the IDP, which will be our backstage portal, and they'll be presented with a number of golden paths," Phillips said. "There's one IDP, there's one device. I like to coin the phrase, 'There can be only one'."
The results have been rapid and measurable, revealed Andy Greenough, Engineering Lead, Cloud DevOps CI/CD.
"We've gone from many manual processes and hand-offs into a completely automated end to end," he said. "Now it takes less than an hour to onboard you across the entire platform. In that timeframe of less than one hour, they're given access across the entire platform and all of the tooling.
‘It’s less than an hour, which is a 99.88% reduction time. We're using Harness as a unified solution. We've got Google Cloud, we've got Azure, we also have a hybrid private cloud as well. Previously, in all of these tools, all of these platforms. They'd generally been built in silos, and they have disparate tooling.
"So we're now using Harness as a single pane of glass as well as being a SaaS based solution, and that gives us an ability, for the first time, to give our developers one place to go."
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Migration and ecosystems at Chase UK
By contrast Chase UK launched in September 2021, and was cloud-native from the beginning, explained Pete Iordachescu, Platform Lead (CI/CD and Observability).
Since Chase UK launched, the cloud-native bank has acquired two million customers, £20 billion in deposits, and has 500 microservices.
But the rapidly growing bank aimed to move from cloud-hosted tools to SaaS, and from a tool-centric approach to a Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) ecosystem.
With more than 50 AWS accounts ("That is a lot of different dependencies," Iordachescu admitted) and 500 microservices, it was a big job.
He said: "Being in a hyper-scaling organisation, it means that you have to move fast. Customers cannot see what you do.
"We took a long time to get to production, around about a year plus, just so that our migration could take six weeks. So we took six weeks in order to migrate all 500 plus microservices. We did about 100 microservices, obviously in all environments, in about a week."
The experience led to a dramatic change in attitude.
"To get a little philosophical about CI/CD,’ he said, ‘ I think tools are the past. Ecosystems are the future."
