Adopting DevOps practices is a hot topic today and for a good reason. DevOps enables organisations to deliver applications and services faster thanks to the collaboration between development and operations teams and process automation.
With its ability to enhance software product quality, improve security, and accelerate time-to-market, DevOps is a true game-changer for fintech companies.
In this article, we’re taking a more detailed look at the benefits DevOps provides to fintech companies, the best DevOps practices for implementing DevOps in the finance sector, and more.
What is DevOps?
DevOps refers to a combination of philosophies, practices, and tools that help deliver applications and services faster than with a traditional software development approach, which is achieved through active collaboration between development and operations teams and process automation.
Unlike the traditional software development model, where the operations and development teams are siloed, the DevOps approach strongly focuses on collaboration between teams. For example, these two teams can be merged. In such a case, engineers work across the entire software development lifecycle, from development and testing to deployment and operations, which requires a broader range of skills.
Moreover, adopting DevOps helps ensure high software product quality and improved security, which are crucial to succeed in the finance industry. Implementing DevOps for fintech is associated with some other essential benefits. Let’s take a closer look at them.
Why do fintech companies need DevOps?
More effective collaboration
DevOps helps create a culture where the business, operations, quality assurance, development, and other stakeholders closely collaborate to achieve their common goal. DevOps ensures better visibility and transparency across all teams, with all the participants sharing responsibility for the product’s success.
Automation of routine operations
DevOps tools help automate a range of processes throughout the entire product development lifecycle, including software development, product updates and rollbacks, testing environments setups, software delivery pipelines, maintaining logs, etc. This allows IT departments to focus on improving the performance of the infrastructure rather than spending plenty of time and effort on routine tasks.
Stronger security and compliance
Data security and compliance are paramount in the financial services sector, making DevOps a welcome innovation. First, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) that come with DevOps adoption help automate software delivery pipelines, minimising errors. In addition, enhanced security is achieved through other DevOps practices, such as better-documented development and testing processes.
Faster time to market
DevOps practices, such as CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous deployment), enable fintech companies to release new features and updates more frequently and quickly. Faster development and frequent releases accelerate time to market, helping finance companies to promptly respond to evolving market needs and stay competitive.
Improved product quality
Through automated testing, continuous monitoring, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC), DevOps helps to improve the quality of financial products. While automated testing ensures that applications are thoroughly tested, continuous monitoring allows for real-time visibility into system performance, enabling prompt issue detection and resolution. IaC, in turn, enables consistent and reliable infrastructure provisioning, reducing configuration drift and ensuring consistent environments across different stages of development and deployment.
Continuous improvement
DevOps promotes a culture of continuous improvement through data analysis and a rapid feedback loop, which provide valuable insights into system performance, user behaviour, and business metrics. These insights enable fintech industry players to make data-driven decisions, identify areas for optimisation, and make continuous enhancements to their products and services.
Best DevOps practices for fintech companies
CI/CD
CI/CD is a short name for continuous integration and continuous delivery (or continuous deployment). Continuous integration stands for frequently integrating the code into the main branch, with every change followed by automated builds and tests. This leads to prompt bug detection and fixes, improved code quality, and considerable time savings when validating and releasing software updates.
Continuous delivery means code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for production. It complements continuous integration by deploying all changes in the code to a testing and/or production environment after the build.
CI/CD delivery pipelines offer indisputable benefits for the financial industry, such as accelerating time-to-market due to robust automation and ensuring high product quality by allowing software development teams to identify and address errors early.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Infrastructure as Code refers to provisioning and managing infrastructure using code and software development techniques, such as continuous integration and version control. The API-powered model lets you interact with infrastructure programmatically rather than managing resources manually.
The infrastructure team can automatically create the same environment every time they get down to a new project. This practice helps ensure that all infrastructure configurations are consistent, well-documented, and version-controlled but still flexible, i. e. it’s possible to break your infrastructure down into modular components to fit with different projects.
Adopting Infrastructure as Code results in faster development and deployment since it helps speed up every stage of the software development life cycle. Moreover, IaC allows you to test applications in a production-like environment no matter the software development phase, which leads to more effective testing.
Continuous testing
As the name suggests, continuous testing refers to performing automated tests throughout the software development lifecycle, resulting in improved product quality. In addition, continuous testing allows teams to mitigate risks and provides insights into what can be done to improve product quality.
Continuous testing offers substantial benefits to the financial sector. Besides facilitating the entire software development lifecycle, it provides value to the business – continuous quality improvements feed into customer loyalty and trust. At the same time, frequent testing helps detect potential problems before they become major.
DevSecOps
DevSecOps (abbreviated from development-security-operations) is an approach that views security as a shared responsibility of the teams. Like continuous testing, DevSecOps promotes incorporating security continuously rather than putting this crucial aspect off until the end of the software cycle, ensuring that deployment-ready software suits all security requirements.
It’s safe to say that the finance sector is a favoured target for cyber attacks, making DevSecOps valuable when building a fintech application.
DevOps adoption: where to start?
DevOps is not just a combination of tools and philosophies. Instead, it’s a cultural shift that calls for a well-planned implementation strategy. Here are the stages of DevOps adoption you can take to start bringing your software team productivity to the next level.
1. Assessment and planning
First, you must thoroughly assess your existing software development and operations processes. This involves evaluating the current infrastructure, identifying bottlenecks, and understanding the pain points to address in the first place. Then, develop a plan outlining specific goals, timelines, and resources required for a smooth DevOps transformation.
2. Cultural transformation
DevOps is all about fostering a culture of collaboration and pursuing a shared goal. This step suggests breaking down silos between development and operations staff and promoting open communication and trust.
3. CI/CD
The next step involves implementing automation tools and processes to streamline and standardise the software development process. Adopt continuous integration and continuous delivery to merge code changes into a shared repository regularly and deploy them quickly and frequently.
4. Monitoring
Finally, implement a monitoring mechanism to gather real-time data on application performance, infrastructure metrics, and user experience. This data will help you spot areas for improvement and support data-driven decision-making.
Final thoughts
As financial businesses strive to stay competitive in the ever-evolving finance industry, embracing DevOps practices becomes essential for their success. By fostering collaboration, automating routine operations, strengthening security and risk management, accelerating time to market, improving product quality, and promoting continuous improvement, DevOps offers a robust ground for innovation and operational excellence.
If you need professional assistance in your DevOps journey, you can use our Cloud & DevOps Services. Contact us at [email protected] to learn more.
FAQs
What are the 4 areas of DevOps?
The four primary areas of DevOps include communication, collaboration, automation, and culture.
Why is DevOps in demand?
DevOps is in high demand because it offers significant benefits to organisations, including faster time-to-market, improved collaboration, enhanced software quality, increased operational efficiency, and a culture of continuous improvement and innovation. In other words, DevOps allows businesses to address the challenges of the digital age and deliver value to customers.
Will AI replace DevOps?
No. Instead, DevOps and AI can complement each other in many ways. Although AI has the potential to automate some aspects of the software development and operations processes, it is unlikely to replace DevOps entirely. AI can’t replace the collaborative and human-centric aspects of DevOps.
Does DevOps need coding?
The extent of coding expertise needed may vary depending on the specific role and responsibilities within a DevOps team. In general, you don’t need to be a full-fledged software developer; however, having a fundamental understanding of coding is highly beneficial for effectively implementing DevOps practices.
