SHI’s DevOps framework helps Investors Bank reduce new AWS service deployments by over 50%

Investors Bank reaps the benefits of a fully functional automation process.

Challenge:

Innovation and agility are essential to staying competitive, but it does not come without challenges. Such was the case for this large U.S. commercial bank, whose cloud journey had been less than optimal due to siloed teams and manual processes, preventing the full capabilities of cloud automation.

Investors Bank established a hybrid infrastructure mode, with a traditional on-premises data center and a growing Amazon Web Services (AWS) footprint. The customer looked to SHI for guidance on automating their AWS infrastructure deployment to leverage AWS more efficiently and securely.

Some of the challenges they needed to address included:

• Long SLAs to bring new services to market
• Time-consuming, error-prone process to manage AWS resources manually through the AWS console
• Lack of DevOps/CICD framework prohibiting the use of Infrastructure as Code in AWS
• No bandwidth to modernize existing toolset and workstreams

Solution:

SHI’s cloud solutions team first conducted a thorough review of the customer’s current infrastructure and deployment methodology to determine the best strategies. After reviewing the options with the customer’s IT leadership team, SHI architected, built, and implemented an end-to-end DevOps pipeline to automate deployment and management of AWS infrastructure with Terraform.

The delivery team guided the customer through the entire process, including:

• Install Terraform and Jenkins on an EC2 instance
• Configure Jenkins pipeline and integrate with CodeCommit
• Install and use Git/CodeCommit with local machines
• Write and deploy Terraform code to deploy networking (VPC + RAM), EC2, and S3 infrastructure
• Leverage EC2, S3, CodePipeline, and Lambda to trigger to deploy code through their pipeline
• Integrate AWS Service Catalog with Jenkins
• Create and store security keys with AWS KMS
• Provide extra security of sensitive and regulated data with AWS EC2 Security Groups
• Integrate AWS Security Hub providing added layers of security to meet customer regulatory requirements
• Manage IAM permissions

Throughout the project, SHI deployed an identical solution in a sandbox environment. During the working sessions, SHI would demo the updated solution from this environment and answer any customer questions before guiding the bank through the next steps.

The full project scope included an ongoing knowledge transfer through every phase of development and deployment. SHI provided a detailed runbook and guide covering the entire process for the bank’s internal IT staff to utilize.

Outcome:

As a result of this engagement, the customer reduced the time it takes to deploy their code by more than 50%. Additionally, the process helped their developers focus more on the code, updates, and delivery, instead of spending a substantial amount of time manually deploying their applications.

By leveraging the new tooling, the bank’s existing IT staff can write code stating which AWS resources they would like deployed, which triggers a build to automatically deploy and update the AWS resources to match the code.

Other significant benefits include:

• Easily save the code for commonly deployed resources into modules, which can be referenced in future code to deploy preconfigured infrastructure even quicker
• Reduce the possibility of human error even further since most of the infrastructure is preconfigured
• Free up staff to innovate more instead of managing tedious manual processes

The customer now has a fully functional automation process that includes pipelines, scripts, and services, as well as proper training using the new technologies to ensure they have long-term success.