Dickie - Principal DevOps Engineer: Exploring DevOps challenges and innovations in the FinTech Industry

The concept of DevOps is widely understood. What are the major challenges for a DevOps professional working in the FinTech industry?

In FinTech, you have a relatively high chance of working with banking systems that are considered legacy. Migrating those legacy systems to use newer technologies as part of a bank's digital transformation can seem daunting at first, especially if there is red tape around tooling and systems allowed to be used in a bank's strict and secure environment.

Luckily, at Backbase our product is plug-and-play, meaning we are free to use any of the latest and innovative technologies we like while developing internally, while also being able to port our product into the technology being used by the banks.

What cloud, tools and technologies are often used in DevOps work in Backbase?

If there is a new buzzword going around, there is a high probability that someone at Backbase is doing a poc on it. We love exploring new tools and we keep everything we do open to the rest of our colleagues. We have a tight relationship with all of our developers internally, and as we speak, our innovation chief is looking into Microsoft Fabric Lakehouses and OpenAI. Our more day to day uses include tooling like Gitops, Terraform, EKS, AKS, GHA, Containerization and Kubernetes systems. Our deployments range from on-prem self hosted instances to hybrid cloud as well as AWS and Azure.

At Backbase you are free to automate your working life as much as you like, using whatever scripting tools that best suits the job. We also have a major focus on monitoring and observability to ensure our products are production ready and at optimal performance when we ship them to our customers.

What innovations and new technologies do you observe in the field of DevOps and what are your plans for development in this area?

Backbase has a vision to change the way people see and do banking, and I fully believe using as much of the AI knowledge we can gather to transform the data we see in usage trends can help us understand how to better service our customers and the end-users this technology reaches.