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DevOps for Finance

How DevOps will help you surpass the common challenges of financial services software development.

Download DevOps for Finance.

Download DevOps for Finance.

Download a free copy of DevOps for Finance, an O’Reilly report by Jim Bird for the financial services software insider who’s heard about DevOps, but is unsure whether it represents solution or suicide.

DevOps, until recently, has been a story about unicorns. Innovative, engineering-driven online tech companies like Flickr, Etsy, Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Netflix and its Chaos Monkey. Amazon deploying thousands of changes per day.

DevOps was originally about WebOps at Internet companies working in the Cloud, and a handful of Lean Startups in Silicon Valley. It started at these companies because they had to move quickly, so they found new, simple, and collaborative ways of working that allowed them to innovate much faster and to scale much more effectively than organizations had done before.

But as the velocity of change in business continues to increase, enterprises — sometimes referred to as “horses,” in contrast to the unicorns referenced above — must also move to deliver content and features to customers just as quickly. These large organizations have started to adopt (and, along the way, adapt) DevOps ideas, practices, and tools.

This short book assumes that you have heard about DevOps and want to understand how DevOps practices like Continuous Delivery and Infrastructure as Code can be used to solve problems in financial systems at a trading firm, or a big bank or stock exchange. We’ll look at the following key ideas in DevOps, and how they fit into the world of financial systems:

  • Breaking down the “wall of confusion” between development and operations, and extending Agile practices and values from development to operations
  • Using automated configuration management tools like Chef, Puppet, CFEngine, or Ansible to programmatically provision and configure systems (Infrastructure as Code)
  • Building Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to automatically test and push out changes, and wiring security and compliance into these pipelines
  • Using containerization and virtualization technologies like Docker and Vagrant, together with Infrastructure as Code, to create IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS clouds
  • Running experiments, creating fast feedback loops, and learning from failure

To follow this book you need to understand a little about these ideas and practices. There is a lot of good stuff about DevOps out there, amid the hype. Read more…