How a British Financial Services Group Provided Virtual Machines in Rapid Time

The Customer

The customer is a British Financial Services group focused on retail and commercial customers – with millions of customers in the UK, and a presence in nearly every community. It is a company that helps businesses and individuals while making a positive contribution to the communities in which it operates.

Our Role

For Phase 2 of this engagement, a global consulting firm partnered with Appsbroker to design and build new capabilities to support the evolution of the Tech Optimisation Google Cloud landing zone that enables migration of further workloads.

The Challenge

Phase 1 of this programme left the customer with a solution which automated the generation of a golden image through pipelines that could be used within the bank, but ultimately required further work. To complete this, multiple squads were needed meaning the consulting firm and Appsbroker would work alongside another partner to finish the delivery of this programme.

The Solution

Appsbroker produced a series of designs for new capabilities and deployment patterns to support new capabilities, then engineered them into repeatable Infrastructure-as-Code modules. Patterns included SQL Server Always-on Availability Groups and compliance scanning of compute images through an image factory and patterns to support the requirements for highly available workloads.

Te Benefits

The customer has reduced the time needed to provide VMs to application teams from several hours to approximately 30 minutes, while also providing consistency due to removing the possibility of human error in configuration. This is as a result of automated builds and compliance testing of five different image families across both Windows Server and RedHat Enterprise Linux.