A container platform for the banking industry why, what & how

Last week I gave a nice presentation at Devoxx in Belgium. Devoxx is a 5 day conference for developer and by developer. During this week you are able to attend great sessions on the latest and greatest trends for Java software development, front end, containers, cloud native services and many more. I gave a detailed presentation about the container platform we are building for the ABN AMRO bank in the Netherlands.

Short summary

Being there is the best. You have the ability to watch the presentation from a comfortable chair in a bit cinema room. Remember: Devoxx Belgium takes place in the Kinepolis cinema in the northern district of Antwerp.

For those who missed it: the following topics were addressed:

  • The container journey of ABN AMRO from 2017 until now
  • A brief overview of the most important pipelines
  • A detailed explanation on how the container platform works
  • The context of container security within the container platform
  • All about compliance to keep ABN AMRO secure and compliant

Highlights

From a developers’ point of of view, these were the most exiting highlights. The team at ABN AMRO created a so called “Kubernetes Operator” to hook into any interaction of the Kubernetes cluster. For example: when a developer creates a new namespace, the kubernetes operator automatically provisions the secret which is needed to fetch Docker images from the internal container registry.

Another great example is the enforcement of compliance rules. At ABN AMRO it is not allowed to create public facing load balancers. OPA – short for Open Policy Agent prevents this in an early stage. Other example compliance policies are: encryption of S3 buckets, the usage of the right tags for resources, force the usage of the right IAM profiles.

Monitoring and logging is important for every application in production. The container platform uses centralized logging and monitoring for this use case: send logs to Cloudwatch and from there to Splunk. How? Use AWS Container Insights. Great thing about this feature is: it’s brand new and we are already using it in the banking industry. It proves, we are not a big and slow organization.

Watch the video

Being in a cinema has a lot of advantages: large rooms for a lot of people and also the ability to record the session. You were able to watch all session while the presenters explained their sessions. Next to it, you can now view them on Youtube as well.

Hope to be there next year as well with a new talk!