DevOps

Casestudy on
Rabobank

By

Nick Sauvagerd,
Mohammed Imaaz Tarapathi
Introduction to Rabobank

• With 60,000 employees and hundreds of resident and client-facing

applications, Rabobank of The Netherlands is one of the 30 biggest
financial organisations in the world .
• Dutch international banking and financial services provider
Rabobank is based in Utrecht. The organisation is made up of 89
regional Dutch Rabobank’s (as of 2019), a central organisation, and
numerous specialised foreign offices and subsidiaries.
Why did
Rabobank start
to use DevOps?
• The biggest IT problem
was caused by the
excessive number of
complaints about project
delay’s. Deployments
required too much physical
labour, and failure rates
exceeded 20%.
• According to Ralph van Beek,
the bank's DevOps architect for
the payments domain, Rabobank
has strong reasons to adopt
DevOps. The bank needs to
update its old payment
application landscape. Rabobank
was under pressure to make its
apps and front-end features more
adaptable as a result of mobile
banking, the API economy, and
the entry of fintech companies
into the financial industry.
How did they Implement it?
• To integrate and automate its work processes, the bank began to use DevOps techniques
and development technologies. The "Radical Automation" initiative of Rabobank
focuses on automating every step of its development process and approaches IT from a
business perspective. Additionally, the programme looks for process inefficiencies and
strategies for IT to speed up development and testing.The bank committed to building
massive greenfield applications on the IBM Z platform using cutting-edge technology.
Based on web services, IBM DataPower would safeguard the system.
• Rabobank’s systems were redesigned to be more service-oriented and modular. However,
strong non-functional requirements such as performance and consistency need an
integrated architecture. The new architecture reduced the end-to-end testing to some
extent, but Rabobank’s need for these tests will never disappear.

• Rabobank is using four components to automate end-to-end tests:

• Automated service virtualization (stubbing). Automated stubbing allows the bank to

reduce the size of the end-to-end test by virtualizing the rest of the environment.
• Automated delivery of the test data. The bank requires a highly automated master
functionality to create end-to-end test data that’s both highly secure and high quality.
This automation step also fits in nicely with the new European Union (EU) General Data
Protection Regulation (GDPR). GDPR has strict requirements for anyone hosting or
processing data of EU citizens.

• Automation of deployments. This automation must be done in an integrated manner,

which means deploying a consistent chain of applications together with their end-to-end
relationships through web services and IBM MQ connections.

• Automated execution of end-to-end tests. This step includes automated analysis of the
test outcomes.
What are their • By automating its DevOps
methodology on IBM Z, Rabobank is
getting a variety of benefits.
benefits from Problems with quality are discovered
considerably earlier in the process.

using DevOps? Deployment-related delays have

decreased. The lead time for an end-
to-end test at Rabobank was reduced
from a month to an average of four
hours thanks to the four-part
automation strategy. Additionally, the
bank now has the opportunity to test
only the affected apps.
• According to study by industry
experts, Gene Kim and others,
the correct DevOps approach and
technologies are producing
deployments that are 30 times
more frequent and lead times that
are 8,000 times faster than peers.
Changes have a twofold
increased chance of being
successful and exceeding
productivity or profitability
targets. High-performing IT
firms recover 12 times more
quickly when things go wrong .
• References
• https://techchannel.com/Enterprise/07/2018/rabobank-transforms-payment-system
• DevOps case study: Rabobank cuts deployment by 60 percent | The Enterprisers Project