Indeed DevOps brings endless opportunities for FinTech organizations to speed up time to market. Most of the FinTech development companies are familiar with Agile development methodologies, but haven’t yet adopted DevOps. Nimble AppGenie, fintech development teams that are sound with DevOps methodologies. It has become our standard practice to build products faster and efficiently.

1. Why Is DevOps Essential For FinTech
Development?
DevOps is basically a term for modern software engineering practices that focus on
delivering software solutions faster and better. Similar to most buzzwords, DevOps is
claimed to be important and needed, but not necessarily understood – Why? In this
article, I’ve simplified the FinTech DevOps partnership, and explained why it is
essential for modern FinTech development projects to incorporate DevOps.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a mindset, a philosophy, and a set of practices that brings together
Development and Operations teams, with the goal of enabling software delivery at
high velocity and also to improve products at a faster pace.
In typical software development environments, the Development team (Dev)
constantly pushes changes. These teams continuously come up with new ideas,
write codes and test them to fix any defects before production. The operations team
(Ops), on the other hand, deploy the new features and changes. They are
predominantly responsible for system stability, which they make sure is achieved
through server management, scaling, security, and backups.
So when one group pushes changes and the other group prefers stability, it causes
friction between both, which leads to a slower software development lifecycle. This is
the issue DevOps solve. As stated before DevOps is not a specific kind of coding, it
is instead a mindset, a culture, and a development approach that enables Dev and
Ops teams to work in sync.

2. DevOps Origins and Principles
The early footprints of DevOps can be found between 2007-2008 when Patrick
DeBois, an IT consultant with Agile Methodology expertise, found himself frustrated
with the silos that existed among Agile development teams and operations teams.
He met Andrew Shafer during the 2008 Agile Conference, where both decided to
form the Agile System Administration Group.
The group was aimed to facilitate cooperation between development and operations
teams. Later, in 2009, John Allspaw and Paul Hammond showed how Flicker could
perform 10 deployments a day by just breaking down the silos between development
and operations teams. Given the significant credibility of the concept, DeBois created
his own conference named, DevOpsDays. Later the term was shortened to DevOps.
So far it is clear that the primary purpose behind DevOps was to break down the
silos between Agile development and operations teams. However, the scope of
DevOps isn’t limited to Agile; it is indeed applicable to the waterfall approach too.

3. The principles of DevOps are quite abstract and may seem hard to nail down. But
the following three ways will help you understand the DevOps principles better.
● Shared Responsibility – this approach means that in addition to their core
responsibility, the operations team will care about how the code is built and
tested and the development team will care about production performance.
It underlines that no one is focused on their silo only. Instead, the entire
team will take a collaborative approach to speed up delivery.
● Amplification of Feedback Loops from the right (operations teams) to left
(development teams) facilitate ongoing improvement.
● Promoting Learning & Experimentation – a culture where risk and learning
from mistakes are promoted will eventually lead to a more resilient system.
Moreover, there are several practices that are common in the DevOps environment.
They are as follows:
● Automation of everything including CI/CD (Continuous Integration and
Continuous Delivery or deployment) and Continuous Monitoring

4. ● Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
● Configuration Management
● Adoption of DevOps Tools and Cloud-Native Technologies
FinTech and DevOps Together
Several large-scale banking and financial service providers have adopted DevOps
practices to improve their deployment velocity, keep up with the changing customer
expectations, and stay immune from a new breed of FinTech challengers. Julienne
McLean, agility lead at JPMorgan Chase, believes that speed is the cheat code for
survival in the tech-agnostic financial service space.
As due to Covid-19 pandemic, customers expect to receive banking and financial
services digitally, companies have started to identify their long-standing issues.
Keeping up with customer expectations requires financial organizations to speed up
deployment. However, the digital infrastructure also has to be equipped with robust
security and compliance management. Hence, both FinTechs and traditional players
are making use of DevOps methodologies to speed up their software deployment.
The following are the known benefits of DevOps in FinTech:

5. 1. Increase Deployment Velocity
A report from DORA and Puppet Shows claimed that organizations which made use
of DevOps in 2017, were able to deploy updates, changes, and improvements 46
times more frequently. Also their change failure rate was 5 times lower and their
failure recovery rate was 96 times faster than organizations that didn’t embrace
DevOps. DevOps practices require IT teams to implement a standard code of
responsibility, where both development and operations teams are responsible for the
entire software development lifecycle. This boosts team morale and improves
deployment velocity.
2. Help Manage Security and Compliances
Regardless of initial pushback of adopting DevOps, organizations that have dived
into DevOps culture are realizing that these practices allow them to identify and
address threats more quickly and efficiently. This is the reason that more and more
FinTechs are implementing automation practices to enforce security and compliance
management. In 2021, banking and financial organizations consider DevOps as a
tool for security and compliance management.
3. Reduced Downtime to Zero

6. IDC estimated that large enterprises have to bear $100,000 per hour due to
infrastructure failures. Another report by Ponemon Institute states that the cost of
unplanned outages in the financial services industry is the highest among all the
industries. In today’s competitive environment, financial service providers cannot
afford such infrastructure failures. Hence, there is a need for a new approach to
reduce downtime.
The modern approach to reduce downtime is a part of DevOps practice. This
includes making use of a microservices architecture, which allows organizations to
develop FinTech applications as a suite of independently deployable modular
services. Such a development approach allows organizations to achieve zero
downtime deployment, which mitigates the hassle of maintenance windows and
deployment delays.
4. Cloud Readiness
Gartner reports that banking and financial service providers, which haven’t
implemented DevOps into their digital infrastructure are more likely to leverage Agile
product engineering. DevOps isn’t something you can think about today and
implement tomorrow. It is a cultural shift that needs the right guidance to become a
reality. DevOps is very favourable to cloud environments, where deployments are
done very frequently.
Myths About DevOps Implementation

7. Myth #1 – DevOps is all about changing the way IT teams operate. Successful
DevOps implementation doesn’t solely focus on the software delivery, it actually
considers end-to-end organizational processes as its scope. The idea is to transform
the isolated organizational process into a synchronized and collaborative procedure.
Hence, DevOps brings together more than the Dev and Ops teams. It’s scope
includes infusing agile into compliance management, change management, and
even financial budgeting.
Myth #2 – There is no need for project management. It is a common misconception
that after DevOps implementation, there will not be a need for documentation and
communication among teams. However, the reality is quite different. As software
development and deployment includes several moving parts, each in a constant flux,
it gets virtually impossible to get every team member in sync. DevOps approach
promotes using a centralized work board (i.e. Kanban board), which keeps track of
every task that has completed or is in process. This helps project managers to
visualize the whole project to identify and manage the gaps, bottlenecks, and

8. dependencies. Hence, it is vital for project managers to be involved directly with the
dev & ops teams and project sponsors.
Myth #3 – DevOps cannot benefit security and compliance. Many believe that the
DevOps process only emphasizes speeding up the development process by
facilitating collaboration among development and operations teams. However, the
reality is that DevOps promotes security into the software development process from
inception. The project managers make sure that information security issues
standards are followed and the issues are ratified in the early SDLC stage.
Myth #4 – DevOps is a ready-made solution that fits all. Although it may seem a
straightforward approach to implement DevOps to automate the software
development process. One would argue that by using several tools, it is an easy task
to automate the process. Although there is ample material information and tools
available for DevOps implementation, there is no off-the-shelf solution available till
now. DevOps implementation varies as per the team size and structure. DevOps is a
journey not an instance.
How DevOps Complements Agile for Fintech
Agile product engineering overwhelmingly focuses on the development aspects of
software delivery, leaving operational aspects disappeared into the background. The
Agile process can be made more effective by integrating the teamwork offered by
DevOps.
Organizations that are already making use of the Agile framework, can implement
DevOps to break down organizational silos to create a continuous delivery pipeline
(CDP). The integration of both can optimize the development lifecycle and customer
satisfaction. Moreover, the following can be accomplished with the DevOps and Agile
integration:
● Streamlined released process and better product offerings

9. ● Improved collaboration
● Fewer risk and more value with each release
● Lesser bugs and quicker fixes
● Increased transparency
However, companies often encounter pitfalls while implementing DevOps to Agile
product engineering. The following are the recommendations to avoid them to make
the integration successful.
1. Improve Teamwork Flow. The team members including the scrum master
and the project managers will have to consider not only development but
also delivery and maintenance as their scope of work. The entire team
should be trained to understand release, service, change management,
automation and tools, environment provisioning, and product deployment.
2. Involve DevOps in Sprints. Agile development divides the projects into
several sprints. Integration of DevOps will require strategizing accordingly.
It is recommended to involve the DevOps teams in sprint backlog planning
and daily scrums.

10. 3. Automation Is the Key. Workflow automation is another crucial element of
DevOps combining with Agile. The entire code scanning process should be
automated to avoid potential vulnerabilities. The automation should be
done entirely so that the end-to-end goalposts are the only possible place
where anyone would check for issues.
4. Utilize the Right Set of Tools. DevOps implementation requires more than a
cultural shift. Using the right set of tools is the key to a successful
implementation of DevOps in Agile frameworks. Organizations should
make use of configuration management tools to create or replicate
infrastructure using the IaC concept.
5. Measurement and Analysis. In order to keep track of the development
process after the implementation of DevOps into Agile, organizations would
have to establish metrics to measure its effectiveness. These metrics can
be:
● Percentage increase in the number of releases
● Percentage of on-time releases
● Percentage of non-functional requirement met
● Defects related to support/platform requirements
Conclusion
Indeed DevOps brings endless opportunities for FinTech organizations to speed up
time to market. Most of the FinTech development companies are familiar with Agile
development methodologies, but haven’t yet adopted DevOps.
We, at NimbleAppgenie, have FinTech development teams that are sound with
DevOps methodologies. It has become our standard practice to build products faster
and efficiently.