Barclays Africa/Absa, Standard Bank and FNB/RMB have previously hosted the events and this year, at the third of the annual DevOps Africa Conferences in Johannesburg, Absa has made its contribution.

Through the Africa DevOps conferences the banking industry inspires and builds a thriving DevOps culture and aims to grow local, sustainable skills to help run IT ops even better.

The theme for this year’s conference is “Scaling DevOps through Infrastructure”.

The Africa DevOps Conference creates a platform which serves the purpose of getting the community to share skills development case studies, lessons learned, various successes and whatever is needed to ensure the growth and long-term future success of DevOps in South Africa.

This years Conference promise was to make a valuable contribution to the growing community of DevOps practitioners in South Africa.

From design through the development process to production support, DevOps is a relatively new approach to managing the application life cycle which aims to overcome structural challenges in the typical application life cycle, improving the speed and efficiency at which applications can be developed, deployed and managed of which both are vital in today’s fast-moving and highly competitive markets.

Over the years, applications have become vital enablers of business processes where virtually no business of any size can run competitively without the right applications, and consequently the efficiency of the development process has grown in importance.

Various processes have also evolved over the years to improve the process of developing and then deploying applications and application upgrades.

According to Peter Rix, Absa Chief Technology Officer, for the age old question of how to bring applications teams together, AI, APR’S, Operational Capability, and things like access control is the answer and the ecosystem that we will use to bring these things together in the future.

Up to date Absa has been making great progress on the application side of things, however, one of the things they are currently struggling with is infrastructure of scale with little bits and pieces of infrastructure running, yet not knowing exactly how to scale it.

“We believe that very few have the answer to that and therefore we have decided to make that the topic of the day,” says Rix.

With that point-of-view Absa have come to realise and understand the importance of bringing security components into what they are doing.

According top Rix Absa is still very young in this process and will need to think about how to fit this whole component together.

Their main focus however is to test different penetration capabilities since it is a fundamental part of what needs to be taken forward in the DevOps journey to be successful.

The next thing Absa is working on is the Artificial Intelligence side of things, by looking at Ops and by underpinning Bots and operational components of it and how it can be used to drive the typical things they don’t want to do themselves, really mundane work, and some of the intelligence and decision making processes.

It takes a lot of time to set these environments up which is why automation is key for Absa to take away the pain from software engineers so that they can really focus on their main engineering duties.

One of Absa’s most exciting things on their radar currently is the Engineering network that gives developers total freedom as it is separated from the production network.

It is part of a whole set of deliverables and Absa has not quite gotten it right just yet, but the idea behind it is that it is made impossible to get onto the bate production network.

“The network gives our developers the freedom to innovate and do gearbox stuff which is key to where Absa lands.”  Rix adds.

Absa believes that in the next year there will be massive adoption because of the level of freedom in the Engineering Network which is key to where Absa is currently.

“As with any company Absa also have their struggles, our three main challenges at the moment is operationalising in the cloud, getting their skills and getting enough skill, and the dealings of the legacy and how to take it through,”

“On the people side of things the drive to do collaboration and create those working spaces is important. There has been a great demand from our first co-lab, we are now at our fourth stage and currently 400 people want to go into the next stage, although we will need to push back, but so the desire for the freedom space is very high.”

“We will most probably start scaling all these components across the organisation through a higher level of mobility particularly in the remote areas, and we are looking at many different ways to educate and grow and if there is one taking of what we are trying to drive it is how we do growth-skill.”

“We have also looked at how companies like Google and AWS have stood out with their corporate culture and started to change by focusing on what our Value proposition is which is just another component in driving our success, however we still have a little way to go.” Rix concludes.

For more information about the 2017 Africa DevOps Conference, please visit www.africadevopsday.com.

Delegates Networking over coffee

Delegates lining up for food and beverages