Key Lessons Learned from Building a Wealth Management Portal Using Cloud Native Architecture

Lessons learned from an engineering and cloud transformation journey in a financial services organization

• Understanding and changing the culture of the organization is crucial for driving digital platform adoption
• Cultivating a product mindset and promoting a 'build it, run it' culture is important
• Customizing a framework for engineering and cloud transformation is necessary
• Innovating with open source and cloud native technologies can provide powerful solutions
• Establishing a platform engineering team can accelerate automation and enhance developer tools
• The impact of the transformation journey was seen in improved automation, reduced time to market, and increased platform adoption

The speaker shared how they had to establish a culture of product mindset and promote a 'build it, run it' culture in order to drive digital platform adoption in a financial services organization. They also emphasized the importance of customizing a framework for engineering and cloud transformation, and innovating with open source and cloud native technologies. The speaker shared how establishing a platform engineering team helped accelerate automation and enhance developer tools, leading to improved automation, reduced time to market, and increased platform adoption.

This presentation shares the valuable lessons learned as part of the multi-year digital transformation journey for a large wealth management portal by applying cloud-native architecture. The journey started with a large decade-old monolith application with inflexible architecture, disintegrated user experience, vendor-dependent system architecture, higher time-to-market, and legacy technology stack. The vision was to build a modern & easy-to-use digital platform for advisors / financial professionals & their clients to collaborate better and transform the value chain. The key technology architecture principles were vendor-neutral cloud-native solution, open & standards-based integration architecture, microservices-oriented nimble architecture, and release on-demand-based deployment architecture. Additional capabilities required were quicker time-to-market, unified user experience, flexible and maintainable system architecture. Lessons learned are summarized as using Cloud-native technologies (Kubernetes, Docker, Rancher), applying Opensource solutions at a large scale (Elasticsearch, Redis, Drupal, PostgreSQL, enablement of continuous delivery using CI/CD patterns (using Jenkins, Helm), Building Microservices platform (applying Spring Boot, API-first architecture), and more.