A major migration to Google Cloud: What you think should happen, and what really happens

Adnan will be touching - among other - on the architecture, implementation of various data and the AI and ML solutions his teams use, but the focus of his talk will not only be on the technical side. He will also outline the journey of him and his teams before, and during the migration. From his perspective as Tech Lead, Adnan will reflect on how it all started, which challenges he and his teams faced along the way, how they solved them, and the lessons learned.

Adnan: “Before we initiated this process about three years ago, it was virtually unthinkable that ING would move its Data Analytics Platform (DAP) to Google Cloud, not least because of possible security, risk and compliance issues. Despite this, we were able to start thinking and planning how we wanted to approach such a platform migration. ‘We’ being a single team that did everything it takes to bring tenants and their projects to production on GCP. From onboarding, design and architecture, to creating the infrastructure as code (IaC) and support while adhering to ING’s rigorous risk, security and compliance principles. As the number of use cases grew, we needed more engineers. To make sure we were able to meet tenants’ demands in a generic way with a platform, we grew from a single to four teams.”

Today, around 20 engineers are working in this area, in different countries throughout Europe. “Although we are spread out and have different specialties, we collaborate seamlessly. That wasn’t easy at first, but we learned as we went along and grew increasingly close. Now, we’re working towards a way where every engineer in every team can tackle every issue. It helps that we have clear software development principles as our starting point. Thanks to our design, everyone is on the same page about what is being built. And all teams work with the same tooling, as our aim is to reach complete convergence when it comes to the software stack used. That has been an important lesson from this whole process.”

During his presentation, Adnan will share more lessons learned with the audience of mostly cloud and security experts. “Whether you work at a bank or in a completely different type of organisation, everyone faces similar issues. You have to think very carefully about the choice between on-premises and cloud. It helps if you work in an environment where you have the freedom to experiment. After all, you really can’t plan everything in advance. You shouldn’t want to either. On the other hand, you should work towards a clearly defined common goal – and the people involved should share responsibility for achieving it.” “We were given that freedom at ING. That enabled us to take another important step towards ING’s data-driven future with this migration. And we’re continuously developing it. The platform is never finished; it seems like it’s evolving every single day.”

Read more about the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.

Adnan will be speaking on Tuesday, 1 October at 12:10 h. He is always open to questions, feedback and interesting discussions related to his presentation. ING has a stand at the Expo. You can find him – or one of his colleagues – there.