Discover recently completed a multi-year technological transformation, moving 1,200+ applications from our legacy tech platform to a new cloud-based platform. The migration effort was enormous, requiring coordination across every business unit at Discover.
"Almost every area of our technology landscape went through this migration, including much of the software, systems, and tools employees use every day. The value this brings to Discover and our customers is a true game changer, helping further differentiate our offerings from other financial institutions," said Marlene O’Neil, VP Infrastructure Services.
This blog post highlights our migration journey, focusing on the technology changes and updates we made, the steps we took to ensure adoption at the enterprise-wide level, and the benefits we've experienced so far from our transformation journey.
Moving for scale and security
For years, Discover hosted many of its applications on a cloud platform in our own data centers. While this approach was effective for a time, after significant research and planning, the decision was made in 2018 to move to a new container-based platform to help build a technology foundation that would scale to keep up with evolving technology demands.
The container-based platform offers a uniquely structured solution that aligns to Discover's new cloud hosting strategy and enables engineering teams to securely build, test, deploy, and manage their applications. Plus, the hosting platform we chose gave us the ability to choose any cloud provider, preventing vendor lock-in and offering a level of reliability and scalability that far exceeded what existed in the current Discover data centers.
Standardizing a path to production
In addition to moving all our applications to the containerized platform, our company standardized around a single, automated deployment pipeline called Trident. With this single pipeline, all Discover applications can access standardized flows – which helps application teams code, test, and deliver their products faster.
"With Trident, teams were able to refactor their code, address system dependencies, test and tune their applications before deploying to a production environment which allowed us to effectively monitor performance and ensure there was no negative impact to our services," said Craig Katz, Director of Infrastructure Product Management.
Trident enables daytime deployments to precede blue/green flips, which improves the quality of software product releases and allows for faster automated rollbacks if needed. This automated path to deployment supports compliance, improves issue detection, and speeds issue remediation.
How we accomplished the transformation
So, how does a company as large and established as Discover accomplish such a massive technological transformation?
A few things that helped us along the way included:
- Having strong leadership support
- Taking a phased approach to the migration
- Getting community buy-in
- Leadership support
Our CIO garnered support from the entire Executive Leadership Team at Discover to support the digital transformation. He clearly communicated the need for the transformation and the steps to take to see it through.
A bi-weekly Steering Committee of Business Technology leaders met to review metrics and data and to discuss blockers and timelines for the migration. This helped to ensure teams stayed on track and gave leaders an overall view of how their teams were doing in relation to other teams.
Phased approach to adoption
We took a phased approach to adoption which enabled us to learn and pivot as we went. We rolled out our new platform to a select group of early adopters who began their migration effort without a roadmap for how to adopt the new databases, caching, monitoring, and traffic routing tools most effectively.
As these early teams migrated, they shared their pain points and requirements with the leadership team who were able to change some technology decisions along the journey, while keeping the end goal of the migration in sight.
In true Discover spirit, many of the first migration trailblazers documented their lessons learned, best practices, and other findings to help other teams navigate the journey with clarity and confidence. This proactive collaboration and support system proved to be a critical difference maker in the final months of the initiative where progress was significantly expedited.
Getting community buy-in
A company-wide transformation required company-wide buy-in from engineers and developers across business units. To garner support from the engineering community, we relied on our internal education platform, the Discover Technology Academy, to help spread the word and build community forums around the topic. Early adopters to the technology posted blogs, best practices, tutorials, and articles to guide other engineers in the process.
Along with the site, we held numerous training events and leveraged vendor support to help teams get the skills they needed. We also held regular recurring office hours that were dedicated to answering questions about the new platform and helping teams on their respective journeys.
Cultural and technical benefits of the migration
While we’ve only just completed the entire migration, we are already seeing significant benefits to the strategic moves we’ve made. A few of the benefits include:
- Higher levels of software craftsmanship across Discover, resulting in higher quality, more frequent deployments – which get product enhancements to our customers faster.
- Consistency of practice with alignment around standard approaches resulted in fewer processes that required specific knowledge to support them.
- Improved compliance, better issue detection, and faster issue remediation are a result of standardizing on Trident as the single path to production.
- Fewer platforms to support mean that our developers and engineers can focus more on innovation and less on maintenance of multiple systems.
- Fewer contracts and fewer vendors lead not only to cost-savings but also reduces risk of dependencies on said vendors.
Set up for a future of innovation
While the massive transformation is complete, the cultural transformation that took place to support the migration has led to a culture of continual innovation at Discover. As soon as the migration was complete, the teams pivoted to address the opportunities uncovered during it. This includes activities like cost optimization, improving observability and resiliency, increasing compliance, and embracing inner-source development.
Our new development culture borne from the migration supports partnering across Discover to do the right thing and continue to improve. These things will elevate how we deliver our software products to Discover customers to help them achieve brighter financial futures.
