ABN AMRO Relies on XebiaLabs for an Automated, Scalable Continuous Delivery Pipeline for Private Cloud Applications

ABN AMRO is one of the largest banks in Europe, with an IT organization of 5,000 employees and over 400+ dedicated Agile teams. A few years ago, the bank recognized that in order to scale their software delivery processes, they would need the ability to automate their end-to-end Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines all the way to production across many tools and teams, while increasing efficiency and ensuring that compliance and security requirement were met.

CI/CD Growing Pains

Transitioning to DevOps is a tall order for any organization, especially if you’re making the switch as one of the biggest banks in Europe. ABN AMRO Bank did just that, transforming a large IT organization in just three years.

The journey began when the bank realized that, to keep up with a fiercely competitive market, they would need to transform their delivery processes from waterfall to a full, mature CI/CD system. ABN AMRO’s software development team started by implementing a small Jenkins CI pipeline to manage code commits, with the end result being a deployable artifact stored in a Nexus repository. While this process increased speed and quality in the pilot CI pipeline, deploying artifacts required manual checks, which created bottlenecks when ABN AMRO tried to scale across their other software delivery efforts.

To accomplish their goal of a full CI/CD transformation, they needed to expand beyond their CI tool and implement a robust enterprise solution.

Finding a Solution That Could Do It All

The team at ABN AMRO began to research several CD solutions. Certain features were critical to their strategy:

Visibility into their entire CD pipeline, including both automated and manual tasks.
Visibility into who was doing what, whether security and compliance requirements were being met, where the bottlenecks were, and so on.
Ability to standardize and automate releases and deployments across the CD pipeline for easy scalability.

After researching several vendors, they identified the XebiaLabs DevOps Platform as the one solution that met all their requirements. It is now the backbone of ABN AMRO’s Continuous Delivery cycle.

The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform’s XL Release module integrates all technologies in the pipeline environment, orchestrating releases from end-to-end. The XL Deploy module of the platform enables standardized, zero-touch deployments to all environments in their private cloud from test through production.

The Results

Over 800 applications are on-boarded for fully automated deployment
Release lead times reduced by up to 50%
High-privilege access no longer required to deploy applications
Visibility into the entire CI/CD pipeline
Built-in audit tracking makes it easy and low effort to demonstrate compliance
Multiple CI/CD tools efficiently orchestrated to deliver pipelines to production

“With XebiaLabs, we’ve been able to give our teams more autonomy. Release templates, for example, allow us to offer standard pipelines teams can opt to use. Also, the availability of different templates offers flexibility, and we highly recommend that our delivery teams, who differ in level of maturity, use them. We set up an XL Expert group within ABN AMRO to regularly collect feedback to enhance the way our teams work with XL Release.
XebiaLabs has given us visibility into all of our release and deployment engagement activities, which allows us to control the process and quality.”
~ Alma Stravers, Head of Continuous Delivery at ABN AMRO.