Prior to BBD joining the team, the container runtime platform was merely for running customer containers in a secure and compliant way. After BBD’s involvement, the team has since been able to adopt more cloud-native technologies such as ArgoCD and Crossplane. This improves the feature readiness of the platform and provide tooling to improve the customers experience. As well as align the team for building a fully-edged internal developer platform.
The requirement was originally running a Kubernetes Machine Learning (ML) platform. Our client, who offers financial and related services across 11 countries, needed a reliable solution that would allow them to deploy features in an effortless and standardised manner. BBD assisted the platform team in adding the necessary feature to enable this ML platform to run effectively on top of it. BBD’s platform team stepped in and delivered. Not only the required features, but an improved and standardised deployment model alongside a fully managed platform
Objectives
- Leverage our platform experience to assist client team
- Deliver and extend required features on existing Kubernetes platform
- Introduce new cloud-native technologies
- Upskill client platform teams
- Push the adoption of platform engineering principles and the importance of having an internal developer platform
Benefits
- Improved overall delivery time of software solutions across business
- Secure, highly available and resilient core container platform
- Improved time to market on new features and software
- Created a new deployment model that has been standardised across different client teams using GitOps principles
- Fully managed platform on which additional platforms are built on top of. Allows for each client team to not have to reinvent the wheel
- Seamless and fast deployment process as decreased cognitive load for client developers
- Embedded monitoring, telemetry, metrics and altering
- Feature readiness using industry standard cloud-native technologies
Approach
Integrating into the client’s existing platform team, BBD’s platform experts first assisted in improving and adopting new features on the Kubernetes-native ML platform in order to streamline deployments. Within six months, the team had developed and deployed the required features, and had the platform running smoothly.
During this process, the team took the decision to split the core platform out, in order to make deployments easier and more efficient going forward. This decision did not impact the client’s customers in any way, but resulted in a new deployment model that improved the speed at which features can be delivered on the platform. At a company-level, the BBD team was able to standardise the use of this new model across numerous disparate teams.
What followed this stage of the engagement was a focus on upskilling the client’s team on the technologies, features and functionalities inherent to the platform. For this, a true DevOps approach was followed. Providing tools that would makethe client’s teams’ lives easier (such as monitoring, alerting and observability), all while meeting and following industry best practices.
Technology details
Throughout this project, various technologies, approaches and methodologies were leveraged alongside BBD’s experience and knowledge to best facilitate the client teams with a core internal platform and deployment model.
- Crossplane was leveraged to provide a standard way to manage cloud resources and environments
- CDK and CDK8s were utilised on the platform, providing internal teams with the tools, cloud architectures and best practices required
- After BBD’s involvement, the container platform was not just merely able to run container but was transformed into a universal, extensible cloud-native API
- With each team across the business previously deploying in a different way, ArgoCD was leveraged to provide a “golden path”. Which increased speed at which changes could be made to environments and deployed
- The beauty of the solution delivered lies in the reusability of the features developed. They are adaptable enough to be used in other situations where the same base platform is leveraged.
Impact of BBD’s partnership
Closely partnering with our client on this project, BBD’s platform engineering team was able to transform the Kubernetes platform. Allowing it to be the orchestration layer and the backbone of the future internal developer platform which leverages cloud-native technologies.
