2 posts tagged with "finops"

DevOps in finance is one of the most innovative development practices in the financial sector.

Moving quickly in response to market developments is essential if you want your firm to remain relevant in the current digital world. This is especially true for the financial services sector. In the financial sector, sustaining services while meeting client expectations is more important than ever.

And, DevOps technologies, methods, & concepts have developed as the mechanism to drive this change from pattern recognition to the discovery of new income streams. It covers governance, risk, security, and compliance methods and enhances the quality of application releases. In this article, we will discuss some best practices and case studies for implementing DevOps for finance services.

What is DevOps?#

DevOps is the combination of the words "development" and "operations." It is a software development methodology that emphasizes collaboration and communication between development and operations teams. It aims to improve software development, deployment speed, quality, and efficiency. In the financial industry, DevOps can be especially valuable for improving the performance and scalability of financial systems and reducing the risk of errors and outages.

Best Practices for DevOps in Finance#

1. Increase in Collaboration and Communication between Teams

One of the key best practices for implementing DevOps in finance is to focus on collaboration and communication between development and operations teams. This can be achieved by creating cross-functional teams that include development and operations members and implementing tools and processes that facilitate communication and collaboration. For example, an issue-tracking system like Jira or GitHub can help development and operations teams stay on top of bugs and feature requests. In contrast, a chat tool like Slack or Microsoft Teams can help teams stay in touch and share information quickly.

2. Automation Process

Another best practice for implementing DevOps in finance is to focus on automation. Automation can reduce the risk of errors and outages and improve software development and deployment speed and efficiency. Automation tools such as Jenkins, Ansible, and Puppet can help automate repetitive tasks and reduce manual errors. Automation can also help with testing and deployment by automating the testing process and deploying code to production quickly and efficiently.

3. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are also important practices for DevOps in finance. CI/CD is a methodology that emphasizes the continuous integration of code changes and delivery of new features to production. This can be achieved by implementing a continuous integration server like Jenkins or Travis CI and automating the testing and deployment process.

4. Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Infrastructure as code is another important practice for DevOps in finance. Infrastructure as code is a methodology that enables the management of infrastructure as code rather than as manual configurations. This can be achieved using tools like Terraform and Ansible, which enable the provisioning and management of infrastructure as code. This can help reduce the risk of errors and outages and improve the scalability and performance of financial systems.

5. Monitoring and Logging

Monitoring and logging are also important practices for DevOps in finance. Monitoring and logging help to ensure that financial systems are working properly and that any issues are identified and addressed quickly. Monitoring tools such as Prometheus and Grafana can help monitor system performance and resources. In contrast, logging tools such as Elasticsearch and Kibana can help analyze log data.

Various Case Studies about DevOps#

1. JPMorgan Chase:

JPMorgan Chase is one of the largest financial institutions in the world and has implemented DevOps for financial services to improve the speed, quality, and efficiency of software development and deployment. They have implemented a continuous integration and delivery pipeline, automated testing, and deployment. They have also implemented infrastructure as code and have a dedicated team for monitoring and logging. This has helped them to reduce the risk of errors and outages, as well as improve the scalability and performance of their financial systems.

2. Barclays DevOps Adoption

In 2015, Barclays announced that DevOps was being used as part of its digital transformation strategy. At the moment, Barclays is in charge of managing payments, which make up over 30% of the UK's GDP. The leadership team credited DevOps at Barclays with significantly reducing the complexity of their programs, which allowed them to lower delivery risk and, in turn, improve the quality of their services. Developer satisfaction and code quality increased as a consequence.

3. Capital One:

Capital One is a financial services company that has implemented DevOps for financial services improvements such as performance and scalability. They have implemented a continuous integration and delivery pipeline, automated testing, and deployment. They have also implemented infrastructure as code and have a dedicated team for monitoring and logging. This has helped them to reduce the risk of errors and outages, as well as improve the scalability and performance of their financial systems.

4. DevOps the Lunar Way

An experience that shows Kubernetes doesn't require a large organization to be used. The large monolithic application was divided into more manageable microservices as the first step in their cloud-native DevOps journey. Ansible, Terraform, and Jenkins were used to spin up these microservices and deploy them as a single unit.

They then suddenly began encountering some of the microservices' scaling problems. They thus did not gain in any way from microservices.

They thus began seeking solutions to this complexity by reorienting their attention from machine-oriented to application-oriented design. They didn't care where the containers were operating and instead picked Kubernetes and AWS as the abstraction layer, which allowed them to manage microservices and unleash their velocity. Additionally, they chose Kubernetes for its security features and to describe how the apps should function. With the help of Kubernetes, they currently manage over 80 microservices in production.

Conclusion#

Companies in the financial services industry are under a lot of pressure to embrace sophisticated and demanding software development methodologies that satisfy stringent corporate and regulatory standards. With DevOps, the financial sector can deploy software faster than ever to keep up with demand and outperform the competition they face.

FinOps tools help cloud-based organizations allocate resources and achieve their business goals effectively. Read the full article to get an understanding of FinOps.

All About FinOps from a DevOps Perspective#

Modern-day businesses always try to integrate new practices to make their businesses more efficient, cost-effective, and consumer-friendly. Ever wonder as DevOps what happens when someone forgets to shut down a sizable project on the cloud? The goal of FinOps is to prevent any kind of financial disaster by improving the cloud infrastructure by monitoring everything.

FinOps is not only cost-effective but it tends to make the dev team work smarter to deliver quality work. FinOps practices also lead the way to a better customer experience. Read the full article to understand everything about FinOps from a DevOps perspective.

What is FinOps?#

FinOps (Financial Operations) is a practice adapted for cloud models to optimize the cost of business. All of the FinOps operations happen in a collaborative manner to effectively reduce expenditures while maintaining the same quality. FinOps does the same thing to financials as DevOps does to development.

FinOps is a very effective cost management practice and its implementation is dependent on tools of the cloud and an understanding of operations. It provides extensive information about spending, where the money is used, why it is used, and who is responsible.

Phases of FinOps Implementation#

FinOps distributes its work in phases like DevOps. All of these phases are repeated until the set goal is achieved. Following are the phases of FinOps.

Inform:#

In this phase, all the necessary information about the operations of different teams and departments is gathered. This information includes operation size, cost, and forecast. This phase helps estimate the total expenditures and all the other information like where they are coming from and where they will be used. This phase of gaining knowledge and controlling resources gives stakeholders a clear view of everything going on.

Detailed information helps the FinOps team to keep an eye on every small and big expenditure and optimize all unnecessary expenditures. It also helps them estimate the business value.

Optimize:#

After the necessary information is collected, the optimization phase begins. In this phase, a deep analysis of the gathered information is conducted. This analysis helps the FinOps team to separate liabilities. Once all unnecessary expenditures are identified, these expenses are cut down by using different methods. Some unnecessary projects are shut down to invest in good projects.

The FinOps team also optimizes team size and tools used to optimize the cost of a project rather than shutting the whole project down. These optimizations help these teams achieve their goals smartly.

Operate:#

In this phase, the FinOps team monitors all the cloud utilization to ensure the achievement of a set goal. The FinOps team also helps teams overcome their problems to ensure they reach their goals. All the information regarding the progress of teams is also shared with stakeholders to show them business progress.

What are FinOps Tools?#

Various tools are needed to track the billing, invoices, expenditures, and track progress. Different enterprises use different FinOps tools to help the FinOps team go over the above-explained three phases. These tools are used to track the progress of different departments and teams in an organization, estimate expenditures, track cloud usage, and create detailed reports.

These tools provide all the necessary information needed to optimize and operate. Team sizes, cost, and cloud usage are all decided based on the data provided by these tools. Moreover, projects are shut down based on the information provided by FinOps tools.

Features of FinOps Tools#

Here are some of the amazing features of FinOps tools that help FinOps teams Inform, Optimize, and Operate the cloud effectively.

Tags#

Tags allow FinOps teams to allocate tags and arrange them. These tags can then be used for efficient budgeting, tracking performances and purchases, etc. Apart from that, different cloud resources can be labeled for use accordingly.

Detailed Reports#

Each FinOps team member is responsible for a part of the cloud resource. To understand complex billing and cloud resources, FinOps teams use detailed reports on resources. These reports help these engineers understand the flow of money. On the basis of these reports, FinOps members make important decisions.

Performance Reporting#

FinOps tools also offer a performance reporting feature. This feature works by applying different metrics to all the employees of the organization. Based on the pre-defined metrics, a rating number is assigned to every department in the organization. This rating determines their performance.

This performance reporting helps FinOps members identify strong and weak departments. This data is then used to cut costs and help weak departments reach their goals.

Easy Budgeting#

FinOps tools evaluate different factors to set up cloud budgets and forecast. These tools help the team analyze the area where costs can be cut down. Moreover, these budgeting tools also provide data that helps assign reasonable budgets to different departments.

Benefits of FinOps#

The rise of cloud computing has undoubtedly brought agility and many other benefits. As more and more organizations are transforming to cloud-based systems, it is becoming more and more difficult for them to control their spending and achieve their goals. Over 70% of organizations that have transformed to hybrid and multi-cloud offerings are short on their goals.

FinOps is the best practice that, with collaboration with DevOps, can not only help these organizations achieve their set goals but also help these organizations cut their expenditures to become cost-effective.

FinOps provides a framework that lets DevOps perform their tasks with agility and speed. Hence, building trust across departments.

Conclusion#

The complex cloud structure can be a difficult cost management system for organizations. Many factors have to be taken into account and carefully examined to make any decision in that environment. This not only makes the business harder but also slows down the growth of an organization. Therefore, FinOps is a practical cost management solution for cloud-based businesses.

FinOps handles these complicated cloud businesses by dividing the work into different phases. These phases are repeated until the set goal is achieved. Different FinOps tools are used to collect information and allocate resources. This framework is very beneficial for businesses to take full control.