Bankwest puts slice of broker site on Lambda

Bankwest has put a chunk of its new broker website on AWS' Lambda serverless compute as part of a series of experiments that will ultimately inform its new group-wide cloud strategy.

The bank today launched a "one-stop shop" broker website that pulls together various Bankwest broker services into a central location.

The website offers access to a web-based home loan application tracker that Bankwest launched in November 2016 and was previously only available through an emailed link.

It also hosts the recently launched broker portal - real-time tracking and monitoring on home loans and applications - and broker pricing tool which debuted last month.

The services are protected by a security gateway - an OpenID Connect client written in TypeScript - that was built internally by the Bankwest IT team and is hosted in Amazon Web Services' Lambda platform.

The 'serverless' offering allows customers to pay only for the time they need their code to execute, rather than the per-server instance model of traditional public cloud.

Bankwest engineering manager Chris Dorrington said serverless provided a much higher degree of automation and stronger risk controls.

“The serverless architecture is part of a shift towards automated preventative and corrective controls. These levels of automation strengthen our risk management overall," he said in a statement.

“A mantra of ours is ‘compliance as code’ – from the provisioning of development environments to the continual testing of the cloud infrastructure, we’re able to continuously prove compliance with our security model."

The move is part of a broader shift towards a 'cloud-first' model that has been dictated by a group-wide transition to the agile methodology.

Stay tuned for iTnews' in-depth feature on Bankwest's move to agile and its IT transformation

Bankwest has been playing around with various cloud computing platforms to inform the design of what it calls its "cloud native platform" - where all of Bankwest's digital applications and APIs will be hosted.

"We have been using a number of smaller cloud deployments to experiment with the different platforms, take the lessons and inform the ultimate technology selection," Bankwest CIO Andy Weir told iTnews.

The platform will provide a "fully automated deployment pipeline and standardisation to our engineers".

"This means we can deliver more features to help our customers and colleagues and spend far less time plumbing our applications in terms of operating system upgrades and managing basic services," Weir said.

Customer-facing services like online and mobile banking will use public cloud platforms to ensure customers are getting high performance and reliability, Weir said. The bank is in the final stages of selecting its on-premise and public cloud providers for the cloud native platform.

The broker security gateway is Bankwest’s first release on Lambda, but the bank says two more services will go live on the serverless offering before the end of the year. It is not planning to shift the entire website onto Lambda.