Trident 2.0 is winning awards and making waves

Trident 2.0 is a highly integrated, autonomous pipeline for building, testing, deploying and releasing software to production that was created in-house.
By 
Craig Katz & Dean Parke
July 27, 2023

Customers across financial services have a desire for new products and services to be delivered in record time. This includes current and new cardmembers, deposits customers and merchant partners. Each extra day or week that it takes to develop a solution can cost a company relationships, resources, and revenue. Since Discover® engineers know that properly supporting our customers means confronting these issues head-on, they've improved a software solution process. It's called Trident 2.0, and it's already spearheading big wins for Discover and our customers — including winning Gold from the American Business Awards for Best Technical Support Strategy & Implementation.

Building off the launch of Discover's Trident 1.0 pipeline, Trident 2.0 is a highly integrated, autonomous pipeline for building, testing, deploying and releasing software to production that was created in-house. It consolidates more than 100 application pipelines/processes used by application teams for deploying and releasing code into a single, automated ecosystem, allowing the organization to achieve greater delivery consistency, reduced friction, and lower risks due to change at a pace not seen before.

Bhanuchander Sadineni, Principal Application Engineer at Discover shared, "with Trident, we are able to perform more frequent deployments and releases to production with confidence by taking advantage of the Canary releases offered. Change ticket process is automated so developers don't need to spend time on manual creation of change tickets or waiting for Change Advisory Board (CAB) reviews. Thanks to Trident, developers can spend this time elsewhere in the app development."

When creating this process, the Trident team put the needs of app developers first to design a flexible, scalable environment that can be easily updated to fit the needs of the many different applications it would be supporting. Today, more than 90% of product teams across Discover are leveraging Trident 2.0 in some capacity, and are now enjoying faster speed to market, increased reliability/quality and ease-of-use. In fact, Trident 2.0 is such an asset that applications running on it deploy 90% faster with 60% less risk exposure than those outside it.

Sonika Shetty, Application Engineer at Discover shared, "Trident 2.0 is incredible with ease of use, flexibility to deploy anytime, reliability of the release by testing out early, time saver with automated change ticket creation and high productivity with less time spend on deploy/release activities." Discover plans to utilize this incredible potential to the fullest, currently over 90% of Discover’s direct banking eligible applications are either in pre-production or have been deployed to production with Trident 2.0.

With its innovative framework, Trident 2.0 solves multiple business problems under one umbrella, including simplifying Discover's infrastructure environment, incorporating vulnerability change gates throughout every stage of the pipeline for stronger quality control, seamlessly integrating automation for a consistent and user-friendly experience, and improving the company’s delivery of high-quality software for its customers.

The ability to release high-quality products/upgrades to customers in under two days on average compared to more than two weeks prior to Trident 2.0 allows Discover to further strengthen its market share and capitalize on more business opportunities. With over $8 million in projected annual savings thanks to Trident 2.0's power of automation, the team is thrilled to see what new heights this incredible data pipeline will lead Discover to next.

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