Fidelity Investments, a multi-national financial services corporation, is looking to move the “innovation needle” by moving to a cloud-native ecosystem. Embarking on this type of journey — to move thousands of applications, workloads, and data between on-premises and the public cloud — is no easy deed, especially when its financial services operations have to deal with countless regulations and compliance. 

But Fidelity has been taking small steps and deploying its entire fintech into this hybrid-cloud model. Becoming a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and using open-source container-orchestration, Kubernetes, has given them a good push toward their digital transformation. 

“We are seeing that Kubernetes, CNCF, and cloud-native technology are the key players for us when we go multicloud and hybrid-cloud model,” said Amr Abdelhalem (pictured), head of cloud platforms at Fidelity Investments. “That’s why we are here. We are here actually in Kubernetes and KubeCon for that reason. That’s where we see this abstract layer that guarantees you the portability for moving your application from one cloud provider to another.”

Abdelhalem spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), chief reckoner at TechReckoning, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in San Diego, California. They discussed Fidelity’s innovation, cloud-native, Kubernetes, and open source (see the full interview with transcript here). 

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

Miniman: In the last year, [Fidelity] has now over 500 applications running in the public cloud. And Fidelity also joined the CNCF. So how does Fidelity look at Kubernetes and the CNCF? How does that fit into your company’s mission? 

Abdelhalem: We’re very focused at this time in cloud computing, machine learning, in AI technology. We had the first financial robot in 2015. We have the first augmented-reality financial advisor, which was actually released this year as a prototype. So as part of that innovation, we’re seeing CNCF, cloud computing, and cloud-native as keys for our innovation.  

Miniman: Give us a little bit of kind of the breadth and depth of your team.  Cloud platforms? What does that mean inside Fidelity? 

Abdelhalem: So Fidelity has hundreds and hundreds of DevOps teams and thousands of applications. It’s globally distributed. It had all kinds of workloads … and it’s running in a very highly regulated environment as well. We are always looking for this autonomy between teams, agility,  improved time-to-market, and customer experience. And the key for that is called cloud-native.  

Troyer: How are you using Kubernetes today? Where are you on that journey? 

Abdelhalem: So Kubernetes, I would say the majority is running on-premise. We’re very intensively moving to the public cloud on the Kubernetes side. At this moment, we are building an offer inside my team … [which] will guarantee that portability between all the cloud providers. So for the development team to board our platform, it will be kind of seamless for them to where they’re gonna land. They’re gonna be landing in AWS, Azure, or on-premise. 

Miniman: Joining the CNCF as a member, bring us inside. Are there any specific goals you have? And what you’re hoping to both as a company as well as part of the community to get out of it? 

Abdelhalem: So we have big hope right now in open source for our project about multi-clouding. And our focus is mainly on the higher regulated part. We’re very focused on the compliance and security part, and that’s where we can contribute back to the open-source community.

Miniman: Give us a little walkthrough as to the projects you’re using any key partners that you’re allowed to talk about that are useful and helping you to achieve your mission?

Abdelhalem: So, we’re very focused at this moment in the Kubernetes project itself. We start exploring some of the open-source projects in the CI/CD part. Additional to that, we are starting using a few frameworks like Flux. We’re exploring service mesh at this time, and I hope we get lucky there.

Troyer: A few years ago, with folks in the financial industry, you would have some arguments, some discussions, sometimes heated discussions about security in the cloud in a highly regulated industry. Do you still have to have discussions about compliance and security in the cloud?

Abdelhalem: That’s why we already have our own policy management tool. And that’s where I see the potential, like moving from building it yourself to more of using an open-source project and try to reuse it and contribute back to that open-source community — like something such as OPA, for example. So that’s the next generation, where I can see it will help us as well.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. 

Photo: SiliconANGLE