First mover advantage in digital banking

Inspiration for a new ecosystem and culture

Previously, standing up the infrastructure that underpins the bank’s key applications and services was time and resource intensive. Due to supply chain issues, procuring new hardware could take up to three months, followed by several more months of dead time. This resulted in long stretches with zero revenue and significantly delayed project delivery timelines.

“Our aspiration is to enable every developer to be as productive as possible with hyper-automation for consumption of all our cloud services, which will improve time to market,” Ambani explains. “But it also requires a significant cultural shift, so we needed something easy to learn and simple to use.” Along with key colleagues like Rapid Payments product owner Jayshree Maistry and Business DevOps Lead Darryn George, Ambani aimed to standardize infrastructure provisioning through an infrastructure as code (IaC) solution that helped developers simply and easily procure the infrastructure they needed without IT assistance.

Initially, the bank used a range of open source products, including HashiCorp Terraform Community, but quickly outgrew that approach. “One issue we always had was ensuring app teams used a specific module we’d written and properly stored the state file,” Ambani says. “We needed to simplify the process for provisioning infrastructure by upgrading to an enterprise-grade solution if we were to move faster and take advantage of the head start we had on the rest of the market.”

After a brief evaluation period, Nedbank upgraded to HashiCorp Terraform Cloud because of the solution’s robust automation capabilities, enhanced scalability and security, and platform-agnostic design that made it easily compatible with the bank’s existing AWS-Microsoft Azure-Kubernetes-MongoDB tech stack. With Terraform Cloud, Nedbank has an expansive self-service ecosystem of reusable infrastructure modules developed by the bank’s subject matter experts with input from practitioners across the organization.

Now, any developer can request resources via a GUI that triggers a call for an immediately deployable infrastructure module — all while adhering to the bank’s stringent security and operational standards, which are automatically applied and logged in a configuration audit trail for visibility and control. Using a GUI helps developers quickly provision resources without needing to be a Terraform expert or familiar with HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL). “For the central team, Terraform Cloud makes it easy to manage our entire environment because it delivers a single workflow for both AWS and Azure and comes with built-in policies and encryptions,” Ambani says. “More importantly, it’s helped us foster a culture of collaboration and ongoing improvement to the IaC practice that serves both our near-term and long-term organizational goals.”

A well-timed transformation in a well-regulated industry

Ambani says Terraform Cloud has drastically reduced the amount of time and energy it takes to stand up critical infrastructure that supports the bank’s product development and enhancement efforts. “Infrastructure procurement that used to take several months now happens in just a few minutes with Terraform Cloud,” he says. “We’re able to complete projects at 25% lower resource costs and have been able to move more than 1,000 virtual machines a month using the Terraform Cloud pipeline, saving us tens of millions of rand over the past couple of years.”

In addition to raw cost savings, the bank is also lowering risks and frustrations. Attaining near-instant infrastructure saves IT staff time by eliminating the distractions of responding to escalations from the application teams. Meanwhile, implementing Terraform Cloud and HashiCorp Vault Enterprise for identity-based security automation and encryption as a service substantially strengthens the bank’s security posture, a necessity in a highly regulated sector like financial services.

Ambani anticipates extending Nedbank’s reliance on Terraform and, potentially, other HashiCorp solutions, because of their technical strengths — and because of the ongoing support the bank receives from the professional services team. “Working with the HashiCorp team has been an absolute pleasure as they truly want to help Nedbank move forward and succeed,” Ambani says. “They proactively offer advice and take feedback from us regularly, and then come up with ideas that help us incrementally improve our operations to reach our business goals.”