Enterprises from across the spectrum, including world-class financial institutions, benefit from DevOps as a critical aspect of achieving business goals. There is an exceptional need during the development of large scale applications, which often rely on dozens of developers, for a solid, secure CI\CD process. With the addition of a well-founded DevOps standard to existing development and release automation practices, current teams enjoy minimal impact.
The webinar “The DevOps Highway to Success in the Financial Industry: An ING Case Study”, is an excellent illustration of before-and-after DevOps implementation. In the webinar, Yaniv Yehuda, CTO and cofounder of DBmaestro, and Önder Altınkurt, Technology Product Manager at ING Bank Turkey, discuss the impressive effect of DevOps on ING Turkey’s substantial software development teams.
The webcast is free and open to everyone! Sign up below to watch it on demand:
ING Turkey
ING Turkey (“ING”) develops in-house core banking software, and uses nearly 150 database schemas for accounting, cash management, CRM, and forex development. All of ING’s development teams use databases through PL/SQL database changes and chains that include business logic.
Nearly four years ago, ING began a transformation process to increase the efficiency of their development teams, and has been working with a standard practice for the past three years. To this end, ING created a pipeline, middleware, and user ware, but had yet to adopt a standardized approach to the database.
No Source Control Means Out of Control
The lack of database source control had serious ramifications. Programmers could override previous changes; it was unclear which tasks were going to production; and there was no certainty of deploying a tested application to production. At times, 15 developers were working on the same schema, or on the same object, and so there were lost and forgotten changes, and changes not included in releases. Moreover, there was no correlation between physical changes and business requirements, and it was not possible to associate business tasks with database changes. As a result, ING experienced:
- Production downtime
- Code that passed UAT (User Acceptance Testing) but which failed during production
- Developers generating scripts on the day of production release, scripts missing changes and objects, and difficult regression testing
- No clear vision of what was in production, and no real definition of a version
- Releases to production different from previous releases
Searching for a Solution
ING’s needs were quite evident. They required a solution to enforce source control, ensure that new developers followed existing process, and provide one shared environment with clear visibility of tasks and activities. Any acceptable solution would need to implement a unified automated release process that included permissions plus support for different teams and their cherry picking processes. Finally, ING wanted a product that could integrate with other tools such as Jenkins, Microsoft TFS, and their own internal mechanisms.
It took time for ING to find the right fit. They discovered that most products were too focused on schema comparison, did not help solve source control challenges, and required significant process changes for developers. In general, most solutions were not easy to implement and not integrated with the database itself, while some changes could be implemented in the database but not in TFS.
However, after evaluating DBmaestro, ING thought it had a winner. DBmaestro’s solution was implemented in November 2017 and was soon producing results. The first production release was in January 2018 and enabled a blueprint for other projects. By May, ING had onboarded 40 projects, and by July, had done so for 70.
DBmaestro Delivers
From a technology standpoint, DBmaestro’s source control provided a clear and straightforward path for all developers while supporting both simple and complex databases. DBmaestro delivered an automated build process for different teams and tools, and generated scripts based on tasks to support cherry picking and versions as needed by various teams. Additionally, with DBmaestro, ING finally had clear version definitions and no longer had to suffer from lost code, manual steps before a release, wrong dependencies, or incorrect scripts. Finally, the DBmaestro solution provided additional functionality including roles, policies, and measurements.
As a result, ING’s software teams became much more efficient and faster in meeting business goals. The overall process of development accelerated while downtime was reduced. ING also benefitted from improved regulatory compliance, particularly with SOX.
ING now has close to 100 developers working with source control and only two DevOps people for all of ING’s operations. DBmaestro is critical for ING’s larger projects; when there are a lot of changes, half a day of manual work has been reduced to a few minutes of automation. Lastly, DBAs are now used more efficiently and only need to provide approvals, whereas they once needed to check scripts, databases, permissions, and other factors.
Next Steps
Even after the many benefits provided by DBmaestro, ING is still finding additional uses for the technology. ING is currently connecting its releases to GDPR requirements and integrating with metadata repositories for governance (production control). DBmaestro is also being implemented for the provision of organizational policies (for example, dropping a table can be done in development but not in UAT or production), error detection earlier in the development process, and maintaining additional controls (tickets, reviews, etc.).
We invite you to watch our webinar and discover how DBmaestro helped ING get the full benefit of DevOps. Simply click below!
