NAB has lifted the covers on its adoption of Harness CI/CD and GitOps tooling, using it to “remove developer toil” and further standardise the steps required to deploy software to the cloud.
(L-R) Harness’ Nick Durkin and NAB’s Paul Roney.
The bank, together with software vendor Harness, used AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas at the end of last year to unveil the work.
What started as a “small pilot” in 2022 has transformed into a platform used by “over 2000 developers… every day”, CTO Steve Day said in a video.
But the real detail was at re:Invent in December, where NAB’s core platforms executive Paul Roney spoke at some length on Harness adoption.
NAB’s efforts around standardising software engineering practices to get new applications and features into the cloud faster pre-date Harness by several years.
Roney acknowledged them but said that even with them, there’s “too much toil still out there for the devs, in our opinion.”
The bank is positioning Harness as a way to go further than it’s been able to so far and is encouraged by what it’s seen to date.
“At the end of the day, we want our developers to spend time developing great features for customers, and making sure our services are resilient and secure,” Roney said.
“As we’ve moved to cloud, we’re really trying to simplify the development experience and have a really strong development platform for our developers to work on as they’re building applications on cloud.
“A platform that really removes a lot of the toil is really, really important to us.”
The vendor’s field CTO Nick Durkin said Harness is designed to help people go faster, get to the cloud [and] to production faster … with [fewer] quality, security and finance issues.”
He cited another bank’s complex documented checklist of rules that need to be followed to deploy to production as an example of the types of challenges encountered by developers in banking environments.
By “abstracting that away” from developers, Roney said they could focus their efforts fully on new features.
“We’d really love to get to a place one day where [developers have] just got their dev space and there’s that much abstraction from them, they can sit there and focus on the applications and services they’re building for customers, and most of that toil is gone,” Roney said.
“We want them to be able to do that confidently in a process and on a platform that’s as automated as possible, using templates that have thought about deployment strategies, that have thought about rollback strategies, that make it easy to build, make it easy to see the telemetry around the work that they’re doing, and has strong auditability – as much automation as possible.
“That’s what we were chasing.”
While not yet at its end goal with Harness, the bank was positive about its progress to date.
Central among the benefits is that NAB now has “real confidence in [developers’] compliance to the software standards that we have”.
The bank had also seen benefits including “deployment pain reductions, a reduction in build failure rates, decreased build times and deployment frequency improvements.”
A written case study points to a 67 percent reduction in build failures and similar efficiency improvements around troubleshooting.
Harness also plays a role in ensuring new releases meet security requirements, enabling more “shift-left around security and early detection of vulnerabilities in the dev lifecycle.”
The use of Harness appears to be at the expense of Jenkins.
While there are only veiled references to Jenkins in the video and re:Invent presentation, they point to Harness being viewed as a superior way for NAB to meet its long-term goal of simplifying the way developers deploy into the cloud.
Ry Crozier attended AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas as a guest of AWS.
