Creating a Containerization Center of Excellence to modernize applications in an enterprise

Creating A Containerization Center of Excellence to modernize applications in an enterprise.

Evolve the way products were built and delivered by lighting the fuse of cultural transformation.

Our client launched many successful products in the financial services space, demanding more features, high availability, and faster time to market. The existing platform while functional highlighted many challenges due to the monolithic nature of their applications architecture, complex integration, and different practices of deploying applications across their portfolio.

We needed to come up with a strategy that took a step forward into re-imagining the future of their applications, while still solving today’s problems. We also saw this challenge and an opportunity to increase cloud adoption among the client teams, and bring more people around an exciting purpose.

A container strategy seemed to be the best fit, but we also knew that it takes more than just the technology to truly adopt a change.

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After doing a day workshop with a representation from different teams that should be part of the solution (Dev, Infra, Security, Operation), we all agreed that going down the containerization path was the best path forward, and EKS was the chosen service.

Instead of Implementing yet another ad-hoc solution, we started by building a POC to define “what good looks like” modeling around a single application. We then started building the common shared services that could scale this POC into a containerization COE and an on-boarding platform (bootstrapping, CI/CD, observability, self-healing, etc.)

As we were on-boarding the first application, we worked across application teams to identify skill gaps, outline a training plan, and advocate for the values that this solution provided.