In the midst of global Digital Transformation, businesses face significant challenges. SCB TechX, a leader in digital technology, offers xPlatform, a Platform-as-a-Service solution. It advances DevOps into DevOps as a Service, automating and delivering tasks comprehensively. This helps organizations reduce costs, simplify workflows with automation, and manage DevOps tasks independently, enabling rapid product and service development.
The Background of xPlatform
The team of DevOps experts at SCB TechX understands that preparing infrastructure, pipelines, observability, security, and releases to encompass the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) before developing and delivering products and services for each project takes considerable time. Additionally, there’s a shortage of DevOps-skilled personnel in the market, and developers cannot fully replace DevOps. Many organizations face these challenges. Therefore, SCB TechX’s DevOps team has begun implementing DevOps Best Practices through automated workflows, evolving into DevOps as a Service. This helps teams deliver faster without increasing staff, allowing developers to manage tasks that were traditionally handled by DevOps themselves. They’ve also simplified other platform functionalities with easy access and a comprehensive, automated SDLC process. Recognizing these issues and solutions, xPlatform has successfully tackled them, earning SCB TechX the prestigious Thailand Team of the Year award at the 2024 Asian Management Excellence Awards for revolutionizing company DevOps operations with their ‘DevOps as a Service’ platform innovation. This has efficiently reduced project startup times and development costs, effectively managed Cloud resources, and delivered numerous leading products and services through xPlatform, including PointX and eKYC. Hence, xPlatform stands ready as a solution to enhance operational efficiency, reduce costs, and deliver products and services to organizations facing DevOps shortages or seeking streamlined operations.
Introducing xPlatform
xPlatform is SCB TechX’s first DevOps as a Service platform, automating the entire workflow cycle under the SDLC processes of developers and DevOps. It features a simplified interface to empower developers to independently develop and deliver projects—from infrastructure setup, code implementation, infrastructure provisioning, auditing, application deployment, to release products and services to market quickly and efficiently.
Why choose xPlatform?
- Enterprise-level expertise: The xPlatform team excels at Enterprise-level expertise due to extensive experience in developing and delivering solutions to numerous large organizations. Deep understanding of problem causes leads to pinpointing solutions, covering comprehensive risk prevention measures. This ensures that automated system designs meet xPlatform’s Enterprise service standards.
- Reduced preparation time: xPlatform reduces the time spent preparing before starting development and delivering projects by setting up infrastructure, creating pipelines, and managing security aspects all under its comprehensive SDLC process. This significantly cuts down on the time needed for project delivery.
- Automated DevOps tasks: xPlatform mitigates the scarcity of DevOps personnel in the market by automating all DevOps patterns and processes into pipeline templates. This includes defining processes, committing code, screening sensitive data, and offering a software catalog supporting both backend and frontend technologies such as Java, Kotlin, Scala, NodeJS, Python, Golang, Mock, Airflow, Flutter, and Serverless. It covers options ranging from commercial services to open source, aligning with DevSecOps practices and enabling developers to deploy to production immediately after coding and testing.
- Cost-effective cloud management: xPlatform helps reduce cloud management costs by automating checks on cloud resource usage and scheduling, ensuring unused testing environments are deleted or shut down as scheduled. This efficient management system helps organizations save costs effectively.
- Effortless and fast releases: xPlatform streamlines the release management process by storing essential documents such as security results and performance reports systematically. This allows quick and convenient deployment of products, services, and applications with a single click.
- Comprehensive scheduler and notification system: xPlatform addresses fundamental issues like resource scheduling and expired certificates by providing alerts and notifications to all users. It manages certificates as organizational assets, records expiration dates, and notifies users for renewal, ensuring smooth operations and reduced risks.
- Enhanced visibility: xPlatform enhances team visibility into infrastructure changes by providing a self-service portal for real-time access to change histories and problem root causes. This prevents wasted time searching for causes of issues like application access failures due to firewall changes.
- Prevent incorrect data updates: xPlatform prevents accidental updates of production data to non-production environments by validating patterns specific to each environment (e.g., .np, .dev). This validation process alerts users to errors, preventing incorrect updates.
- Continuous technology updates: xPlatform ensures its technology remains up-to-date, allowing customers to use tools that evolve with changing demands. It offers tools such as Hardening Base Image, Open Source tools like OPA, Trivy, Trufflehog, ContainerD, Grafana, Prometheus, KEDA, Springboot, Istio, Airflow, Litmus, ArgoCD, Opentelemetry, and Keycloak. Customers can deploy these tools through a self-service portal, ensuring flexibility and reliability.
Key Features of xPlatform
- Branching Strategy and Pipeline Automation: Customers can choose a suitable Branching Strategy for their projects, including comprehensive CI and CD pipelines aligned with Trunk-based Development and Gitflow. These are automatically generated based on the selected Branching Strategy.
- Software & Infrastructure Catalog: This feature integrates Service Catalogs and various pipelines related to software and infrastructure management through a simple UI. It facilitates linking every change occurring in the Release Management feature, providing visibility into each release’s change data.
- Environment as a Service: This feature empowers customers to independently manage environments, such as easily duplicating environments for simplified testing and scheduling automatic deletion of testing environments at specified times.
- Release Management: This feature enables comprehensive management of release processes, including services and their dependencies like infrastructure, secrets, release artifacts, and related advanced notifications.
- Schedule and Notification: This feature ensures organizational-wide visibility of all changes, enhancing risk awareness through automated notifications. It assists customers in easily identifying root causes of issues stemming from critical changes or upgrades, such as those affecting service calls to platforms like Google Maps.
- Cost Management: This feature systematically manages cloud resource costs, including analyzing usage to recommend cost optimization solutions. It allows customers the flexibility to run workloads on either X86 or Arm64 architectures, thereby optimizing expenses and enabling environment toggling.
- Security and Audit: This feature assures customers of the security across all layers of service and underlying infrastructure managed by xPlatform. It includes robust security measures and management of sensitive data, allowing customers to pull reports for audit teams.
- Integrations: Recognizing the necessity of both technical and non-technical tools in SDLC processes (such as Jira, Confluence, Gitlab, Jenkins, SonarQube, HashiCorp Vault), xPlatform consolidates integrations. It also manages roles and access rights via Fine-Gain Access Control Lists, accessible through a convenient Self-Service Portal tailored to user needs.
Service Models of xPlatform
SCB TechX’s xPlatform offers two service packages as follows:
1. Professional Package: Provides xPlatform services through a website connected to the public internet. Suitable for medium to small-sized organizations, it operates on a shared service model. Interested organizations can immediately receive Dev access without the need for additional infrastructure setup. The entire DevOps process, from inception to deployment, is fully managed and automated for ease of use, resembling having a dedicated DevOps team.
2. Enterprise Package: Also delivers xPlatform services via a website connected to the public internet, designed for large enterprises. It includes customized operational systems tailored to each organization. Organizations interested in enhancing network and security operations can implement additional measures for their security. This involves setting up Workflow Executor Accounts to integrate data specifically between xPlatform and the organization. Moreover, each organization can install identity verification systems based on internal department responsibilities, enabling them to independently manage access rights to environments and data. The streamlined processes ensure quick deployment.
For further information or to consult with DevOps experts, please contact our xPlatform team at contact@scbtechx.io
