Financial services company makes context switching easy with automated development environments

Highlights

• Faster onboarding time and increased team fluidity: Company Z decreased onboarding time for their developers and was able to onboard developers into unfamiliar tech stacks quickly in support of their rapidly growing business.
• Reducing environment drift - Developers were using varying operating systems (Windows, Mac and Linux) which prevented projects from running at all on some developers’ devices. By standardizing environments using Gitpod, they eliminated reproducibility issues.
• No ‘day 2’ overhead: Company Z had limited DevOps engineering capacity. By using Ona “self-hosted, but not self-managed infrastructure, they deployed Gitpod’s CDE solution to their AWS cloud account, configured with their VPC network. All operational concerns like releases and patching are now managed by Ona.

About Company Z

‘Company Z’ is a financial technology company that specializes in providing personal loans and credit products and operating under various US state licenses.

Their technology stack consists of: Java, Spring Boot, GoLang, Angular, TypeScript, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, Octopus Deploy, AWS EKS, and AWS Lambda

Challenges

Technology sprawl and Windows hardware compatibility issues

Company Z is transitioning from a focus on their main revenue earning product to a diversified portfolio of products. This change increased technology sprawl across the organization, hurt business agility as shifting developers became challenging, and created knowledge-silo risks.

Standardization is important to Company Z because their teams are set up as short-lived “pods” to allow flexibility for developers to move fluidly between teams, depending on business need and demand. However, their diversified set of products began to put a stress on developer onboarding. Developers have to learn new technologies or reconfigure environments to become productive.

They also experienced operating system disparities and replication issues when setting up their development environments. A third of their engineers use Macbooks, whilst the other two thirds use PCs. For some of their projects, developers running different operating systems meant additional workarounds to ensure alignment between development and production. For example, out-of-the-box images for SQL server don’t have the SQL command installed and the team had to create workarounds to support this use-case. The team also had instances of projects being completely unusable on Macbooks that were possible to run through Ona.

These organizational challenges prompted Company Z to investigate cloud development environments as a solution for standardizing and automating their development environment setup, improve onboarding speed and eliminate operating system incompatibility issues. They were looking for easily creative and centrally controlled environments that didn’t need robust documentation.

One day CloudFormation deployment with no operational overhead

Following a successful security audit of the CloudFormation template and networking architecture of Ona Enterprise, Company Z applied their CloudFormation template. In just one day Company Z deployed the full Ona architecture including all networks with VPCs and subnets, EKS clusters, RDS databases using CloudFormation.

They subsequently set up their configurations like SSO and onboarded their first team into Ona over the course of a two-week proof-of-value. Users installed the Ona extension, automated secrets into their development environments, ran tests with localstack, debugged their integration tests inside their powerful development environments.