Cloud and DevOps Implementation
Big Four BankCase Study – Cloud and DevOps Implementation using GCP and Harness CD Platform
Background:
A Big4 bank is undertaking an ambitious digital transformation program which hopes will deliver a tenfold improvement in speed and digital capability. The program is focused on building a new banking platform which is Application Modernisation and API-First. The platform utilises state of the art technologies such as docker, Kubernetes, and service meshes, and is heavily dependent on DevOps practices such as infrastructure as code, automate first, and Continuous Integration/Delivery.
The bank has selected Google cloud platform (GCP) and Harness as the cornerstone for Cloud and DevOps and continuous delivery enablement to streamline the CI/CD process, improve security controls, and have better governance over the deployment process of their application workloads.
TL Consulting is a strategic partner of Harness for the Asia Pacific region. Our Professional Services team were the first engineers to ever complete the Harness technical partner exam worldwide. We provide certified Harness Architects and engineers that have experience leading and implementing the Harness platform in complex enterprise environments.
With this level of experience working with Harness as a partner, TL Consulting is in a good position to strategically enable clients and maximise the value through streamlined automation, deliver ROI, and accelerate time to market from their harness adoption.
Outcomes:
The onboarding process is complex and involves working across multiple focus areas and it becomes necessary to involve a harness partner to accelerate the onboarding process and to increase the adoption of harness among the different value streams. In addition to this, it was required to build a capability around the continuous delivery platform with an aim to improve the observability and governance of harness to capture security events, logs, and metrics, at the same time, improve the visibility around change management for executives and release managers.
Operationalisation of harness as a continuous delivery platform
Onboarded around 8 value streams with around 500 services deployed using harness
Automating the release management process through integrating harness with ServiceNow to:
Enable Change requests in ServiceNow using in harness pipelines to automate the release management process
Enable auditing of change logs in ServiceNow during a harness deployment
Act as a conduit between ANZ and Harness to manage the different issues raised by the value streams
Embed the value streams features wish list with Harness’ roadmap
Verify the rollout of Harness features/fixes into ANZ’s instance through setting up a shakedown environment to mitigate the risk and minimise the impact of changes on the value streams pipelines
Services included:
Google Cloud Services, Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Secret manager, Google Compute Engine, Splunk, Dynatrace, Service Now, Harness, Google cloud build, GitHub actions, Artifactory, Google artifact Registry.
Activities:
To accelerate the harness CD platform onboarding process in GCP and increase the adoption of harness among the different value streams, the following activities took place:
Resource Provisioning in GCP
Harness platform operationalisation
Standardisation of designs and workflows
Assisting teams getting onboarded and help with their workload configuration
Troubleshooting issues that may arise and manage them with harness as a vendor
Consolidate the feature roadmap with Access Testing Pty Ltd teams and drive the roadmap with harness
Accelerate the adoption by building configuration templates
Evaluation and implementation of continuous verification using Dynatrace
Integration of release management with ServiceNow
Evaluation and implementation of Harness’ Pipeline Governance feature
Explore areas of improvement around the reuse of templates and artifacts across similar apps
In addition to this, to build an observability capability around harness as a starting point, the following activities took place:
Improve governance by setting up controls to capture security events generated from harness into Splunk
Improve visibility by pushing harness logs to Splunk
Capture security events and audit logs into Splunk
Explore areas of top-down improvements to governance by setting up more controls around security and compliance
Explore areas of bottom-up improvements to visibility by capturing key metrics and logs.
Assist in defining harness SLO’s and SLI’s
Capture deployment and service metrics into Dynatrace (e.g.: deployment duration, etc)
Setup dashboard to monitor the different SLI’s (e.g.: no of delegates in namespaces/projects, delegate health, etc)
Explore ways to enrich Dynatrace’s data by leveraging data from dependencies (e.g.: Artifactory, GCR, Harness SaaS, etc)
Explore ways to define end to end playbooks to trigger an action when a certain event is fired
Definition of a strategy and roadmap to help the organisation meet its DevOps strategic objectives
Setup the Toolchain & Pipeline Design
Continuous Delivery and Infrastructure automation.
Test Automation & CI Uplift
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