How Scotiabank is Modernizing its Approach to Software Development
A cloud-native platform like Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) is designed to enhance developer productivity. It abstracts away infrastructure-level concerns so developers can focus on writing great software, not provisioning VMs or troubleshooting network latency. As a result, PCF tends to be quite popular in the enterprise, attracting more and more developers over time. The question, then, is how does IT manage and secure PCF at scale, supporting hundreds and sometimes thousands of developers, without needing an equal number of operations pros?
For Scotiabank and others, the answer is automation.
“The key to operate such a large scale platform as PCF is automation,” said Yuri Litvinovich, a platform engineer at the 186-year-old bank. “And in our case, we have automation built in using Concourse pipelines set in place. We have pipelines for many different aspects. We have pipelines for installs. We have pipelines for upgrades. We also do backups using the pipelines.”
Concourse is a modern build engine that enables engineers to create and manage continuous integration/continuous development pipelines. It is popular with developers whose applications run on Pivotal Cloud Foundry, but it is also useful to engineers whose job it is to manage the platform itself. PCF, like all software, needs to be maintained, patched, and updated. Concourse lets ops teams do this with no downtime and little to no impact on users.
The benefits don’t stop there. It also gives ops teams back time that they can use in other, more valuable ways, as is the case at Scotiabank.
“[Concourse] helps our engineers to spend their precious time on solving interesting engineering challenges versus going through the repetitive tasks that don’t bring lots of results and lots of, let’s say, gain.” said Litvinovich in an interview at Cloud Foundry Summit 2018 in Boston. As a result, he added, “we also plan to add more features so that developers will be even more comfortable and even more flexible with how they use our platform. And eventually that will benefit our customers, internal and external, to give them better customer experience.”
That’s not all Litvinovich had to say about how Scotiabank is modernizing its approach to software development. Watch the full interview below.
Change is the only constant, so individuals, institutions, and businesses must be Built to Adapt. At Pivotal, we believe change should be expected, embraced, and incorporated continuously through development and innovation, because good software is never finished.
Automation is the Answer at Scotiabank was originally published in Built to Adapt on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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