DevOps for Finance

Chapter 2. Adopting DevOps in Financial Systems

Enough of the challenges. Let’s look at the drivers for adopting DevOps in financial systems, and how it can be done effectively.

Entering the Cloud

One of the major drivers for DevOps in financial enterprises is the adoption of cloud services. Online financial institutions like exchanges or clearinghouses are essentially cloud services providers to the rest of the market. And most order and execution management system vendors are, or are becoming, SaaS providers to trading firms. So it makes sense for them to adopt some of the same ideas and design approaches as cloud providers: Infrastructure as Code; virtualization; rapid, automated system provisioning and deployment.

The financial services industry is spending billions of dollars on building private internal clouds and using public cloud SaaS and PaaS (or private/public hybrid) solutions. This trend started in general-purpose backend systems, with HR, CRM, and office services using popular SaaS platforms and services like Microsoft’s Office 360 or Azure. Then it extended to development and testing, providing on-demand platforms for Agile teams.

Now more financial services providers are taking advantage of public cloud platforms and tools like Hadoop for data intelligence and analytics, using cloud storage services for data archival. NASDAQ, for example, uses Amazon’s Redshift platform to run a massive data warehouse for data analytics and surveillance applications, adding several ...