Increasing Automation and Resilience with DevOps and Cloud Computing

Moving to Low-risk, Incremental Changes

With DevOps in place, you can change the way you modify platforms, services, and applications. A functional automation pipeline enables you to scrap the once-a-year upgrade approach and make very small, lower-risk incremental changes to platforms, services, and applications. The important part is the process. When you fine-tune constantly, you can get really good at managing releases, upgrades and other changes to your environment.

Payments Canada is three quarters of the way through our first iteration of DevOps implementation. To begin, we have focused on smaller applications for which we can control the entire technology stack. With the two applications that we are working on at the moment, we have fully automated the build and test processes so that we can deploy the applications into the staging environment.

From DevOps to Containerization

Staging is fundamental to containerization, our next step in IT modernization. This is a concept that essentially redesigns the way that software artifacts are created and put into production. Traditional software engineering involves development, testing, then rebuilding for the real production environment and hoping that it works. In a nutshell, containers fully describe your entire environment. What gets tested in your development pipeline is what gets put into production. In other words, once you have tested and certified a software artifact, the work is complete.

Containerization is a concept that has revolutionized software engineering. It is a game-changer even from the resilience perspective. Our next milestone is to containerize the two applications that we are working on and make the process a permanent part of our pipeline in 2018.

Cloud for Agility

As DevOps builds agility, so does cloud computing. In the past few years, the cloud environment has really matured. Larger, risk-averse organizations used to shy away from it; now it’s ubiquitous. Cloud computing today consists of powerful technology companies with world class IaaS and PaaS offerings. Their capabilities are tremendous. You can build a system more resilient in the cloud than you could ever hope to in-house. You can run at-scale transactions across multiple databases and maintain transaction integrity, literally around the world, in real time.

To become an agile, proficient operator of applications and services, Payments Canada is looking at how the advanced technology companies are approaching things. This points to cloud computing architecture very, very quickly. As an organization responsible for the clearing and settlement infrastructure, processes and legal framework supporting financial transactions in Canada, we must of course tread carefully. There are many stakeholders who need to be part of our future-state technology architecture discussions, and we have an appetite to go far.

DRP End Game

The end state that we are aiming at is services and systems architected in such a way that resilience is inherent. DevOps, containerization and cloud allow us to eliminate manual processing, human errors, detect and respond automatically to failure conditions and re-create full production quality environments quickly and efficiently.

So while DRP will obviously remain part of Payments Canada’s operating procedures, our goal is make a disaster recovery scenario an even more remote possibility than it is today. This allows DRP work to focus on true disasters or very sophisticated scenarios rather than preventable outages associated with day-to-day operations