Fintech Developer Streamlines Software Production with JFrog’s Release Lifecycle Management

OVERVIEW

This global fintech company provides end-to-end financial management platforms for customers worldwide, from financial institutions to wealth managers. Headquartered in Europe, the company manages over $1.5 trillion worldwide, helping millions of customers from all wealth segments manage and invest their assets.

CHALLENGES

Prior to adopting JFrog’s Release Lifecycle Management (RLM) capabilities, the software release process was impeded by a severe bottleneck where all packages were stored in a single repository, from which all testing, validation, and promotion occurred.

Since all packages were produced and uploaded to one general repository, Release Engineers had to rely on inefficient manual processes to ensure that all build outputs were verified and ready for production.

To maintain appropriate controls over the process, only Release Engineers were permitted to publish packages into the repository, which created friction between the development and operations teams, resulting in slow and inefficient promotion of software release candidates.

SOLUTION

To solve this issue and speed up software delivery, the Developer Experience team adopted JFrog’s Release Lifecycle Management capabilities to release software with greater integrity and efficiency. By leveraging RLM, the company was able to establish effective checkpoints allowing developers to independently publish packages (builds), which would then be taken for testing and promotion toward production.

Instead of having one general repository, the company now leverages multiple repositories assigned to each Stage of the release process from development through testing to production. Each Stage defined in the JFrog Platform contains the necessary repositories for the technologies included in the release candidate.

Development teams now publish their packages by themselves as Release Bundles, which represent immutable release candidates, into the Dev stage.

Release Engineers seamlessly promote the Release Bundle to the next stage in the release process once the appropriate checks and validations have occurred. Fully validated Release Bundles ultimately make their way to the Production stage repositories in JFrog, now the only place this company’s production runtime can pull from.

RESULTS

The benefits of adopting JFrog RLM go beyond faster, trusted software releases and improved relations between development and operations. Since the company operates in the highly regulated financial services industry, they can now improve the auditability of their software without negatively impacting the development process, including key benefits such as:

• Increased Speed & Efficiency – By shifting publishing capabilities and responsibilities to project teams, the company reduced delays and allowed software to move more quickly through the release cycle.
• Stronger Integrity & Control of the Development Environment – A structured promotion process on immutable Release Bundles ensures that only validated and approved packages reach production.
• Optimized Resource Allocation – Release Engineers can now focus on approvals and quality checks rather than manually managing every package promotion.

LOOKING AHEAD

The company has a global development team based in the Asia-Pacific region. The next step of its journey with RLM is to push Release Bundles to edge nodes based in Asia-Pacific, so that the developers there can more efficiently deploy code and packages to test environments. 

Additional plans include integrating JFrog’s Evidence Collection to further enhance auditability and compliance. This advanced functionality will help the company generate, collect, and audit signed evidence that verifies the readiness of software releases, such as test packages and development checklists, all from within the JFrog Platform.

By enhancing its software release cycle management, the company has set the foundation for future business growth, through meeting the growing demands of its customers for compliance with the evolving regulations of the financial services industry.

For more information about how JFrog’s RLM solutions can benefit your organization, take a guided tour or schedule a one-on-one demo at your convenience.

Products
The JFrog Platform, JFrog Artifactory

Additional Resources
Blog:                     JFrog’s Release Lifecycle Promotion vs. Build Promotion
Solution Sheet:   JFrog Release Lifecycle Management
Case Study:         Application Delivery Firm Slashes Costs and Ensures Sustainability with JFrog