Platform Engineering in Regulated Finance: Self-Service Without Losing Control
Author(s): Amol Diwakar Agade, Samta Balpande
Publication #: 2603029
Date of Publication: 16.05.2025
Country: United States
Pages: 1-14
Published In: Volume 11 Issue 3 May-2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.62970/IJIRCT.v11.i3.2603029
Abstract
Financial institutions are increasingly turning to internal developer platforms (IDPs) to help their teams work faster. At the same time, they need to maintain strong governance, ensure everything can be audited, and keep their systems resilient. This paper takes a practical, data-driven approach to evaluating a specific platform pattern. It focuses on three key elements: golden paths that guide developers, policy-as-code that enforces rules automatically, and evidence-by-construction that builds in compliance from the start. The research targets operations, site reliability, and DevOps teams who manage these platforms. To keep the evaluation grounded in real-world scenarios, we built our workflow and demand models using publicly available datasets. These datasets come from business and finance domains and are available through the UCI Machine Learning Repository. They were collected between July 2023 and July 2024, ensuring the data reflects recent practices. The platform was tested across a real-world portfolio of 42 application teams managing 168 services. The results were significant. Service onboarding—the process of getting a new service up and running dropped from nearly 22 days to just over 4 days. That's an 80% improvement in speed. The impact on engineers was equally impressive. The time they spent manually handling onboarding tasks fell from over 33 hours to under 8 hours per service. This 76% reduction in manual work means engineers can focus on more valuable tasks instead of repetitive setup work. The platform achieves this efficiency through a combination of proven tools and practices. Infrastructure-as-Code using Terraform lets teams define their infrastructure in code. Configuration automation with Ansible handles repetitive setup tasks. GitLab manages the continuous integration pipeline, while Argo CD handles continuous deployment using GitOps principles. Together, these tools create a standardized onboarding process that doesn't rely on a central team to approve every step. To help other organizations replicate these results, the paper includes a dedicated section on computation and reproducibility. It provides the exact formulas used, the parameters that were adjusted, and a step-by-step recipe for implementation. This approach allows regulated organizations in other industries to measure their own improvements and adapt the model to fit their specific compliance requirements and budget constraints.
Keywords: platform engineering, internal developer platform, regulated finance, SRE, DevOps, governance, policy as code, GitOps, Infrastructure as Code, reproducibility.
Download/View Count: 121
Share this Article