DevOps for Finance

Chapter 1. Challenges in Adopting DevOps

DevOps practices like Continuous Delivery are being followed by some digital banking startups and other disruptive online fintech platforms, leveraging cloud services to get up and running quickly without spending too much up front on technology, and to take advantage of elastic on-demand computing capacity as they grow.

But what about global investment banks, or a central securities depository or a stock exchange—large enterprises that have massive investments in legacy technology?

Is DevOps Ready for the Enterprise?

So far, enterprise success for DevOps has been mostly modest and predictable: Continuous Delivery in consumer-facing web apps or greenfield mobile projects; moving data storage and analytics and general office functions into the cloud; and Agile programs to introduce automated testing and Continuous Integration, branded as DevOps to sound more hip.

In her May 2014 Wall Street Journal article “DevOps is Great for Startups, but for Enterprises It Won’t Work—Yet”, Rachel Shannon-Solomon outlines some of the major challenges that enterprises need to overcome in adopting DevOps:

1. Siloed structures and organizational inertia make the kinds of change that DevOps demands difficult and expensive.
2. Most of the popular DevOps toolkits are great if you have a web system based on a LAMP stack, or if you need to solve specific automation problems. But these tools aren’t always enough if you have thousands of systems on different architectures ...