DevOps tools at scale for Major UK Bank
Our client, one of the world’s largest banks, was implementing DevOps to compete with the pace of FinTechs. They realised they needed to provide a robust and fast DevOps toolchain including Jira, Confluence, GitHub, Jenkins, Sonatype Nexus, Black Duck to enable the 15,000 developer community to be highly productive.
The situation
We could see that they had chosen a great set of tools but realized they would need a solution to manage the volume of requests so they could keep the all the developers productive and happy whilst maintaining the stability and performance of these now business critical services.
The solution
The goal was twofold: provide a great customer experience for the employees with as much automation and self-service as possible, and provide capability transfer so that the existing service management team would eventually be self-sufficient.
The Catapult Enable team started by embedding themselves into the service management team so there would be daily interactions and knowledge transfer. Together the team then used Jira to create an employee facing service desk so that developers had a self-service portal for creating and viewing requests. Over time we enhanced the set of service requests and developed knowledge base articles, through Confluence, so that the employees could help themselves. One final addition was to provide automated handling of service requests to further reduce the workload of the service team.
The results
Our work meant that the client was able to offer a reliable set of DevOps services to its global developer community who were now able to be more productive.
- Most requests turned around within a day.
- No major incidents or loss of service for the DevOps tools
- Average response times of <1s for core pages
- The services were managed completely online by a core team of about 15 people down from more than 100, with no need for telephone support.