ShipTalk - SRE, DevOps, Platform Engineering, Software Delivery

ShipTalk - S02E07 - Cloud Native DevOps in Financial Services, Croatian magic, and health education for kids - Bijit Ghosh - Deutsche Bank

• Jim Hirschauer • Season 2 • Episode 7

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In this episode of ShipTalk, Deutsche Bank's Head of Cloud Engineering , Bijit Ghosh, takes us on a culinary journey to Croatia, discusses cloud native adoption and cultural change in the high stakes world of financial services, and brings us all home for meal time with the Ghosh family.

Introductions
Just for fun #1 - Bijit's favorite travel destination
Main topic - Cloud Native adoption and cultural change in Financial Services
Just for fun #2 - Bijit's favorite hobby


Jim Hirschauer:

Hello and welcome to ShipTalk. I'm Jim Hirschauer, your host for today. ShipTalk is a DevOps podcast brought to you by Harness, the software delivery platform. My guest today is Bijit Ghosh, Head of Cloud Engineering at Deutsche Bank. Bijit, welcome to the show.

Bijit Ghosh:

Hey Jim. Thank you for having me on the podcast.

Jim Hirschauer:

Yeah, absolutely. So Bijit, why don't you just take a minute to share your background with our listeners.

Bijit Ghosh:

Sure, definitely. My background is back in 2008 right after college, I started with IBM in the early stage of AI with IBM Watson, and later on Financial Institute. Right now with Deutsche Bank, I'm head of cloud engineering and DevOps where my team is responsible for implementing the DevOps, SRE and the entire IT Ops structure, but at the same time organizing the cloud migration journey into, the Google Cloud services. So starting from strategy and applying to cloud infrastructure management and implementing the DevOps best practices and promoting those cloud management across the firm is my responsibility.

Jim Hirschauer:

Awesome. That's quite a responsibility. It sounds like. It's a lot of work. Of course it is. Alright, so Bijit, as you know, on this show we like to start off with a little bit of fun. So we're gonna jump into our just for fun section. And I hear that you like to travel, so why don't you go ahead and tell me about your favorite place that you've been so far, and, and why is it your favorite place?

Bijit Ghosh:

Oh, great. Yes. Fantastic question. So recently me and my family been to Croatia and, and very specifically, for the food and the culture we love about the country which offered, A combination, the blend of Mediterranean and the central European food. And I think it's pretty much give us the rich culture experience of the Mediterranean breeze and the overall the rich experience. I think that is what we wanted to have the entire experience.

Jim Hirschauer:

Yeah, you know I've been to Croatia a couple of times. I've been really fortunate and I love going there. It's actually one of my favorite places to visit. Personally I've been to Dubrovnik before but I haven't gotten to explore a whole lot outside of that area. I've been to Dubrovnik twice. It was so good. there anything in particular, like any places that you would say were your favorite places or some of the foods that you got to try there? Honestly, I don't even remember the names of the foods because they're different from what I'm used to, but they were delicious, everything I've tried.

Bijit Ghosh:

Yeah, so one specific food is called Peka which is basically a traditional cooking way of baking meat, potatoes, and vegetables. And it's served in the traditional restaurants. And I think the, the best part about Croatia is a scenic road trip which I had from Split to Brag exploring the Croatia Island beauty. That is a remarkable and unforgettable road trip.

Jim Hirschauer:

Yeah, for sure. For anyone who's listening who's unfamiliar with Croatia and the geography, it is right on the Adriatic Sea and it is absolutely stunning. So somewhat mountainous, and you have that like Aquamarine color in the sea right there. Really. It's just one of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen.

Bijit Ghosh:

Indeed it is.

Jim Hirschauer:

Absolutely. All right, so we are gonna jump into something a little bit heavier now. Given your background, you are the head of cloud engineering at Deutsche Bank. I want to talk a little bit about Cloud native and DevOps. I would love to hear your views on what you see shifting in the industry and what are the best practices that you're seeing and you're adopting.

Bijit Ghosh:

So a couple of things which I have seen in the cloud native industry, how it's changing to the design and the deployment and the manageable structure of the cloud. So, the cloud native system itself describe how the application and infrastructure are designed to deploy and managing the cloud. But at the same time, typically based on the microservice architecture which allow us to scale and give us the complete flexibility elasticity and the resiliency we are looking for. And then there are a number of reasons why we and various other organizations are part of this cloud native platforms. Which gives again the tremendous potential to improve the scalability, flexibility, and the resiliency and the security posture altogether. So it has very strong value proposition and ROI related to and also overall efficiency and the cost, it brings the values. With, relation to that, you know the cloud native application platform is growing. It defined a very unique set which encompass various aspects how it going to solve some of the architectural challenges and the process roles and the responsibility overall. But the entire operating model, how we structured that into the cloud native platform. So first of all, the growing need of cloud infrastructure and platform services itself. So that's include how you leverage your your your cloud service provider, including your compute instance, database, storage services, and networking capability. The second elements of operating model is microservice architecture. The operating model should promote the design and the development of application as a collection of loosely coupled and independently deployed services. The third is container orchestration. So as we're growing more into the containers world, containers such as docker play a crucial role in the cloud native application platforms. And the entire operating model should incorporate iteration as a fundamental building block which outline the usage of continuation tool, but at the same time how we creating the container images, how we managing the container lifecycle to define the entire orchestration system to handle the deployment. And this is where the popular choice of Kubernetes comes into the picture. Some organizations are utilizing Docker Swarm or Apache Mesos, but Kubernetes is a defacto standard in orchestration platform.

Jim Hirschauer:

You walk through some important things there and when I look across all of the different companies that are doing similar things, They all seem to have some similar challenges as they're working their way through this process. So how far along are you in the process and what are the challenges that you've seen so far and how are you're working through those?

Bijit Ghosh:

I think we are still growing into the process especially into the architecture and development approaches. And then we are leveraging the fundamentals of cloud computing principles which is serving us to, to scale. But again, our, our maturity is still is still new as we are scaling and, and there are a lot of antipattern we're reducing it with that maturity level. The primary challenge is the cultural shift. Adopting cloud native requires a cultural shift within an organization which involves, how you embrace your DevOps practices, your CI/CD, and the entire mindset of automation and collaboration. So in changing those established process and the mindset is always a challenge, and it may require a very significant effort. Both top down, bottom up. And other few challenges are technical complexity, security and compliance, and scalability and performance and the observability and monitoring altogether.

Jim Hirschauer:

Yeah. So you said something really interesting and this is something I've talked about for many years and I love hearing the different perspectives on this. You mentioned a cultural shift and you mentioned that you were working on it both top down and bottom up. I would love to hear you drill a little bit deeper into that. How do you go about creating a cultural shift in a large organization. It's such a daunting task. I've been there, I've tried to do it myself, and I've seen some things that work and some things that don't. How are you all approaching that?

Bijit Ghosh:

So, again it is again a mindset change. So adopting a mindset of continuous improvement, innovation, and this is the theme we have captured altogether. So the the primary way to create a cultural shift is more about collaboration. Especially the DevOps collaboration to encourage the integration of development team and the operation team and breaking down those silos and promoting cross functional team alignments, joint accountability for delivering high quality software. And then again, there's is a continuous learning and the improvement which basically provide the right iteration, the experimentation, the learning curves.

Jim Hirschauer:

So how do you get that executive alignment? Speaking from a top down perspective, what happens? What is the process of getting that executive support that's needed?

Bijit Ghosh:

Getting executive alignment is crucial for the successful implementation of any strategic initiative. Some of the steps we have taken is to clearly communicate the benefits. What is the strong value proposition which going to serve us for multiyear strategy. But at the same time, the stronger benefit. How are we going to connect with the strategic objective which demonstrate how a cloud native alignment with the organization for a longer term vision. And then educate and build awareness constantly with our executive team showing the right metrics which get them involved into the model overall.

Jim Hirschauer:

Yeah. I love what you just said there. Conveying that value and helping the executive staff to see what is the objective, what's the overall business benefit? So from that perspective, what's the point of doing all this? In your mind and for your business, how have you made that business case? What are those values that you're seeking to achieve? What is the ultimate business objective here?

Bijit Ghosh:

The ultimate business objective is the scalability and the elasticity and also the agility and the time to market we want look for. Especially as the dynamic of the business and the software industry is changing. We really wanted to quickly pivot to the needs and then streamline the continuous software delivery process, which has become more efficient for us to operate but at the same time, it gives us the right resiliency in the high availability system work on. But as you're progressing to the cloud native and the nitty gritty elements is we constantly need to innovate and be competitive in that world.

Jim Hirschauer:

Alright. Well, I've gotta ask the question then. Are you starting to realize some of these objectives at this point?

Bijit Ghosh:

We have seen how it is helping us to give the calculated ROI in terms of cost savings, in terms of the right scalability and the elasticity it gives, but again, we are in the early stage. And I think there are a lot of maturity we have to bake in, into the platform, into the product, and into the services. But definitely it looks very promising in its perspective, the business agility requirements the needs and the potential benefits for, the fast innovation cycle which talks about quicker time to the market overall.

Jim Hirschauer:

So you're, somewhat early on in the process, you see that there is definitely potential here. So many companies have been in this position and so many are headed towards this position as well. One of the interesting things that I saw in the most recent state of DevOps report, they asked a bunch of questions about reliability to go along with the traditional survey questions, and one of the findings was really interesting. They found that, It almost didn't matter what was happening with the other four traditional metrics that everyone is looking to improve upon If you didn't account for reliability in a meaningful way. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Bijit Ghosh:

Yeah. The report talks about some of the key factor that contribute overall. But at the same time how reliability is a core pillar of the feature and the functionality it brings to the customer. Especially the focus on monitoring, focus on learning, focus on automations and building those reliability from the day zero perspective, it's so important. Bringing those learning into, how organization can constantly achieve higher level of reliability, adding more 9s, which, impacting the cost, but at the same time, if you have the right proper automation to deliver the new feature and functionality more quickly and reliably, how what is impact has with the customer. How you delighting the entire experience of the customer and also developer.

Jim Hirschauer:

All right. So look, we've talked about a lot of tech specific stuff here. It's time for our second, just for fun section. Bijit, what is your favorite hobby outside of work?

Bijit Ghosh:

Favorite hobby? I like to cook. I think fully the most important powerful course to correct my oxidative stress. I want to make sure that my, my guts are healthy but at the same time wanted to explore and be more creative with my family.

Jim Hirschauer:

Yeah. So tell me about that. What what kind of healthy foods are you preparing for your family?

Bijit Ghosh:

It, it's pretty much fueling my body with the, with vegetarian food. This is the recent adoption which we have did in our home teaching kids to and then also inform them about the right choice of the food. They have to make especially whenever I'm cooking, I make sure that I talk to my kids about the nutrition value of different food of a different vegetable, fruits and also the lean protein, which is associated with the, with the health. And making sure that they're knowledgeable. Knowledgeable about the foundations of making lifelong choice and that benefit their health. But I think this is what the strong foundations I believe we need to build and to establish and engage our children. To talk about how they can choose the better food, but at the same time create awareness of the balanced meals.

Jim Hirschauer:

I love hearing you say that. I think it's so important as well. I think it's something that not a lot of kids are getting these days. They're really not being taught enough about health and nutrition, which is at the core of their overall wellbeing. So bravo. I do have a question. Thank though you, because it is it is interesting trying to feed children and teach them about health and, and make sure that they're eating healthy. Are they just eating all these vegetables without putting up a fight or, or do they put up a fight like mine did?

Bijit Ghosh:

Of course. Yeah. I think that there's always a friction between me and my kids, but I think it is more about educating them and empower them to make informed choice and develop the healthy habits and create a cultivated kind of positive relationship with them. So they do understand though they don't understand too, but it's all about the value and health aspect it brings altogether.

Jim Hirschauer:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, here's what I can tell you for sure. So my kids are a little bit older now, one's about to go off to college and one's still in high school. And my older one has actually started eating really healthy on their own. It was kind of like their own initiative. So while I tried to raise'em really healthy when they were young and then they got to eat on their own as they grew up and were out of the house more and ate very, very unhealthy, just like all kids do. Mm-hmm. It was amazing to see that transition back to eating with a much more healthy style. And of course they still, have ice cream or treats or whatever, but it's much more rarely, it's much more occasional at this point. So for me that's been amazing to see and I like to think, and I hope that that all started with teaching them at a very young age about what healthy eating is really all about.

Bijit Ghosh:

For sure. Yeah.

Jim Hirschauer:

Alright. Bijit, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for sharing your insights. It's been a pleasure. And to all of our listeners, if you wanna share your DevOps stories as a guest speaker on ShipTalk, please send us an email at podcast@shiptalk.io and we'll get back to you. Thanks again, Bijit. Really appreciate it. And that's all for now. Until next time,

Bijit Ghosh:

Thank you, Jim, for having me.

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