CLIENT STORY
Building a self-service API DevOps pipeline for a leading Australian Bank
A case study on the design and implementation of a CI/CD pipeline for ANZ Bank in Australia.
THE ECOSYSTEM AT A GLANCE
- Self-service capability for ANZ's Business Functions as a part of the 'Opening Up Our Services' (OUOS) initiative.
- Platform-agnostic and extensible CI/CD Service to enable around 50+ service providers across Australia and India to host their APIs.
- Enablement of strategic decision-making for service-offerings through insights obtained from Dashboards.
- Standardisation of API deployment process leading to consistent integration platform and cost saved in managed services.
A key initiative in the Enterprise Integration Services Department at ANZ Bank is to enable customers to consume the services provided by the integration platform easily and effectively. It achieves this through optimising touchpoints with the integration team and reducing the need to understand the underlying platforms and technologies.
One of the goals of the initiative is to build a Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline that is hosted as a self-service offering to be consumed by API providers from across the business.
Another goal of the initiative was to consistently extract and visualise data from the consumption of these APIs to get in insights into their performance that can help business make strategic decisions.
eBlueprint assisted through designing and implementing the CI/CD pipeline using professional and industry-leading DevOps tools and helped creating dashboards that provide insights into the API performance and consumption.
THE CHALLENGES
One of the key challenges for ANZ was that the standard API platform was too complex for Business Service Providers to understand at a technological level.
As an alternative, the businesses used their own methods and channels to publish APIs which in turn resulted in a non-standard and at times outdated technology stack.
This also created an overhead of the business units consuming multiple non-standard platforms with processes varying from provider to provider.
HOW WE HELPED
ANZ Bank engaged eBlueprint’s Integration Subject Matter Experts and DevOps engineers through a vendor to do a discovery exercise on their current processes and platforms to design and implement a solution that enables self-service and ease of use of the standard integration platform. The following capabilities were delivered:
- DevOps Strategy – to build a CI/CD pipeline for API definitions is not a very common scenario in the DevOps arena. eBlueprint used its experience in both the integration/API and DevOps space to build a pipeline using existing tooling and within a strict timeframe to enable faster deployment of APIs on the platform and increase in speed to market.
- Data Analysis and Visualisation – the measure the value that is being delivered by the pipeline and to get valuable insights into the performance of the platform and APIs, eBlueprint used experience from data analysis, aggregation and visualisation to build a series of dashboards for business users, engineers and platform personnel.
- API Management, Architecture and Design – solving the above problem also needed some architectural changes into the API design and management. Subject Matter experts from blueprint cleaned up the API layer by offloading transformations onto middleware that is designed to cater for mediation. The API platform was then used for serving pass-through APIs that were deployed and tested by the CI/CD pipeline.
THE RESULTS
The CI/CD pipeline and Dashboards that eBlueprint delivered has met the Bank’s criteria for General Availability and has been rolled out to business users. It has provided the following benefits:
- Service Provider teams could use the platform independently, which has resulted in faster deployments of APIs by Service Providers and increased speed to market.
- Since the CI/CD pipeline made it easy for the Service Providers to use the API Platform, most of the providers moved from legacy/non-standard platforms to the integration API platform. This resulted in standardisation of the integration platform.
- The dashboard is helping technology teams to obtain feedback on APIs including the areas that need improvement, which resulted in continuous monitoring and the ongoing improvement of services.
