A bank, the cloud, and a paradigm shift

Pre-built ‘landing zones’ safely guide developers

To guide its new approach, Deutsche Bank’s platform team outlined core principles to simplify processes for engineering teams with an “everything as code” approach, automation, governance, and federation.

With these principles, the team crystallized a concept for the “cloud v2” paradigm. Very shortly thereafter, “a mass of application teams and developers were waiting at the gate to onboard” The platform team had to quickly orchestrate a way through the gate and into GCP, in a way that ensured developers could safely use cloud resources autonomously.

The solution was landing zones — Google Cloud resources that internal application teams could provision safely. The feature set of HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise and Sentinel enabled the envisioned landing zone approach.

“We just couldn't see a path forward with open-source tooling that would get us to where we needed to go, with our aggressive timelines,” says Crawford.

With HashiCorp Sentinel, the aptly named policy-as-code framework, the cloud platform team quickly created a library of Terraform infrastructure modules backed by standardized policies governing the way in which application teams would use those modules. This security-first approach helped get the platform team out of the way. Once through the gate, developers had the authority to deploy infrastructure as they saw fit, without reengineering each project from scratch. Because Deutsche Bank jumped straight to Terraform Enterprise, it didn’t have to migrate open-source functionality to Google Cloud Terraform Enterprise made it easy to federate out that solution.

Within six months, the team created its first infrastructure landing zone. Three months later, it opened the doors for application teams to onboard.

Partnership and standard workflows forge success

“One thing that’s been a differentiator has been the engagement and partnership between HashiCorp and Deutsche Bank, built over the course of the project,” says Kemsley. “The relationship we established allowed us to move fast, to help pilot products and work with key HashiCorp resources including the management team and founders to develop a strategy”.

This seat at the table enabled a mutually beneficial relationship, wherein Deutsche Bank could share ideas, concerns and issues and see that feedback reflected in HashiCorp’s release cycles.

HashiCorp also held regular solution sessions, where it trained more than 1,500 engineers in the use of Terraform Enterprise. As Crawford pointed out, “HashiCorp was able to answer questions specific to the Google Cloud rollout. The team also understood day-to-day problems not necessarily related to Terraform Enterprise implementation.”

As a result of the relationship and trust between the two companies, more than 3,000 Deutsche Bank developers have direct access to the bank’s cloud platform, where they’ve deployed more than 200 applications.

“As one of the principle cloud platform engineers, [of the Deutsche Bank Google Cloud platform],” Chalmers noted, “You are able to write the Terraform IaC to create cloud resources, as well as contribute to the policy and standards, that are published to our trusted private module registry”

“That’s a paradigm shift.”

And though the primary focus has been on cloud v2, Deutsche Bank is a hybrid organization. Because of the success using Terraform Enterprise to speed cloud adoption, the bank intends to review more HashiCorp products to solve additional common problems that exist, especially given the increased focus on Hybrid.