
Going Native: Cloud Adoption at Nationwide
Our CTO Gary Delooze is rightly excited by the opportunities and challenges posed by Nationwide going Cloud native.
In his words:
Read more“We get to work on some phenomenal projects that tackle properly thorny problems. What this means for our people is intellectual stretch along with the very latest tools. I’m really proud of how our tech teams have stepped up to the challenges of Cloud adoption and are already evolving with the freedom we’re giving them to fail and grow. Combine that with a hefty dose of cross collaboration, and the very best of Nationwide that we all know, i.e. the integrity and social purpose, and it’s no wonder there’s a growing appetite to join us on this journey.”
Two of our Senior Architects give their view
Alison Bradley – Principal Architect
“As Principal Architect for Cloud, I lead the architecture and strategy for Cloud across the society, through the Centres of Excellence and CTO. This is an exciting role as I have had the opportunity to shape and influence the direction of the Society in Cloud adoption, pushing forward a greater level of ambition to increase safe consumption of Cloud services and technologies.
Building a Cloud architecture team by bringing in specialists and colleagues with a real enthusiasm and passion for Cloud and Digital technologies has been really rewarding. And the creation of a Cloud Centre of Excellence, fully supported by executive level sponsors, has generated real excitement and passion.
We are exploring some really interesting technologies and working with strategic partners with enormous experience in Cloud and digital transformation. It is a unique position within our industry, and a great place to be working at a time of change and innovation.”
Richard Goddard - Senior Architect
“As a Senior Architect in the Cloud domain, I lead on the architectural direction and engineering delivery for a number of areas, including Azure, Guardrails for SaaS and Multi-Cloud reference architecture.
I am like the glue between the various architectural domains, delivery, business and engineering functions. Often, I sit in a product owner space, as well as driving sensible architectural decisions and artefacts.
In Cloud Architecture, we take a proactive, build, test, learn, grow mentality, focusing on product/service driven solutions to deliver tangible benefits, and favour a Kanban approach to working through them.
The best thing about my job is the variety and exposure to bleeding edge capabilities, whether this is working out how we move to OpenShift v4, aligning our API and Microservices delivery to support multi-Cloud applications, looking at cross platform load balancing as a service or taking our teams on the journey from old world fortress mentality to new world.”
Let’s get into the detail. What does this mean in terms of our tools, methods and actual projects?
We are:
- Working with Microsoft to build new thinking into Azure identity tenants, subscriptions and automation through Micro-segmentation
- Refining and testing new approach to creation and management of Azure Identity tenant
- previously only used in one other organisation
- working closely with MS to operationalise at scale
- Building our SRE capability with help from Google and Contino.
- Implementation of DevOps principles, multi-disciplinary teams, Agile methods, Cultural change etc.
- Delivering Multi-Cloud containerised environments and toolchains to help drive the use of Microservices and API based application development.
- Automating deployment and build to provide consumable products and services to the Society
- Use of terraform and Ansible to drive environment deployment, container creation and management
- Creation of Consumable self-service developer environments
- Cross cloud use of Red Hat OpenShift and target of v4
- Service Mesh and Global Traffic Management
- Working with our CASB vendor to develop new detection and protection capabilities.
- Developing policies as new SaaS requests are received
- Building and testing new application protections e.g. Slack
- Wrapping it all up with the right security and controls with regulatory compliance in mind, to deliver Safe and Secure member benefits
- Guardrails, Controls frameworks, Compliance as code, pre-approved environments
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