Capital One DevOps Case Study A Bank with the Heart of Tech Company

1. Capital One DevOps Case Study: A Bank with the Heart of Tech Company

2. Agenda 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. DevOps Journey of Capital One: The When and The Why Changes Made by Capital One From 2012 to 2020 The Success Story: The How Lessons to Learn From Capital One DevOps Strategy Simform’s Solution

3. The DevOps Journey of Capital One: The When and The Why In 2010, the senior management decided to develop the company’s technical infrastructure and set up a culture to attract and retain talented people. Soon, the company adopted agile software development, laying the foundation of the DevOps implementation. DevOps was a natural choice for the concerned teams to achieve faster development and deployment cycles.

4. What Changes Capital One Has Undergone From 2012 to 2020 Adoption of agile practices Building automated test cases Automating deployments and tests Migration to the public cloud All the above changes led the bank to become an open source-first organization. Not to mention, in 2020, Capital became the first U.S. bank to announce the movement of its legacy on-premises data centers to the public cloud.

5. The Success Story: The How Though Capital One had a small team in their early days of adopting DevOps, they wanted to implement an enterprise-wide strategy. Eventually, the company approached its DevOps initiatives in three phases, as shown in the image.

6. DevOps Implementation Steps (The How) Creating cross-functional SWAT teams Leveraging microservices architecture Pipeline Execution Stages Introduced by Capital One Team The Benefits of Microservices From Implementation Building an on-demand infrastructure on AWS AWS Tools Used by Capital One Development Team Automating delivery pipelines using Jenkins Governance with “Clean Rooms” Introducing chaos engineering into DevOps practices Enforcing security in DevOps

7. The How Creating Cross-Functional SWAT Teams Capital One initiated the transition towards DevOps by assigning dedicated and cross-functional “SWAT” teams to two of its legacy applications. These teams successfully implemented configuration management, automated critical processes, and improved the workflow of each app. Having a cross-functional SWAT team from the early stages helped Capital One create shared goals.

8. The How Leveraging Microservices Architecture The bank started investing more time and effort in studying the microservices architecture and its relevance to their company. The development team decided to leverage automated deployments compliant with their general quality standards. They created rigorous and explicit guidelines for software delivery and changes in production.

9. The How Pipeline Execution Stages Introduced by Capital One Team Source control mechanisms Secure storage of application binary Access-controlled application environment Quality and security checks.

10. The How The Benefits of Microservices From Implementation Asymmetric service scaling, Intelligent deployment, Zero downtime Separation of logic and responsibilities Error handling Resiliency design patterns

11. The How Building an On-demand Infrastructure on AWS Based on user feedback at this point, product managers at Capital One focused on upgrading the banking and financial services to a top-notch experience. That’s precisely why the company had a cloud-first policy and architects deployed the new applications on the cloud.

12. The How AWS Tools Used by Capital One Development Team Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)

13. The How Automating Delivery Pipelines Using Jenkins Capital One uses a variety of pipelines to scan and run tests on its code to achieve a company-wide quality as well as faster delivery. Every code update undergoes a series of rigorous automated tests, including integration tests, unit tests, security scanning, and quality checks. The pipeline automatically deploys a release once the code passes all the tests. This way, users do not experience downtime, and teams can release updates without any disruption.

14. The How Governance With “Clean Rooms” The renowned Strategist and DevOps Evangelist, Tapabrata “Topo” Pal and his team borrowed this “clean room” concept for Capital One. They adapted it for the software development lifecycle to brace this combination of fearlessness and accountability.

15. The How Introducing Chaos Engineering into DevOps Practices In 2017, Capital One followed the example of Netflix and implemented its own version of chaos engineering. The company introduced a disruption tool called “Cloud Detour” to test the resilience of the applications they build.

16. The How Enforcing Security in DevOps Initially, Capital One followed a manual and a lengthy security certification process. However, the company soon realized the importance of securing container environments to boost its business encryption in all its services. As a result, Capital One embedded automated security checks into its DevOps pipeline. The DevOps team soon had API access to vulnerability management and policy compliance tools. It enabled them to run necessary tests, obtain reports, and start rectifications without involving the security team.

17. Lessons to Learn From Capital One DevOps Strategy 1. Speed is the new currency essential for responding to evolving user demands. Collaboration between internal teams and automation of various processes help you achieve just that. 2. DevOps practices and team collaborations encourage you to keep trying new ideas. So, embrace a fail-fast mindset, and you’ll soon find a solution that works. 3. Adopting continuous monitoring practices leads your organization to obtain quality results and achieve scalability even if your processes had a slow-paced start.

18. Lessons to Learn From Capital One DevOps Strategy 4. The centralization of delivery tooling eliminates the need to develop and manage each team’s tech stack in different silos. In turn, it reduces duplicate efforts and increases the reuse of resources. 5. Cloud infrastructure enables flexible use of resources. Subsequently, you can avoid the scarcity of possibilities and scale with ease when the need arises. 6. Analyze all the existing development processes, and then set a quality bar to achieve maximum results. Then, automate quality control-based processes to minimize human error to simplify necessary DevOps compliance.

19. Simform’s Solution Yes, DevOps implementation can undoubtedly boost your business by enhancing the productivity of your developers and operation teams. However, DevOps is also one of the most challenging fields today, given the depth of collaboration it requires. And, the desired results may not be achieved when an organization rushes into the implementation without knowing how DevOps work.

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