How does Developer Experience (DevEx) impact the adoption of serverless infrastructure in financial services? Efficient DevEx is not only about developer productivity—it directly supports compliance with regulations like the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and accelerates innovation. In this blog, based on insights from our expert Alexander Rusa, we examine how DevEx enhances serverless implementations in financial services, addressing challenges and driving resilience.
What You’ll Learn in This Blog:
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Alexander Rusa: DevEx stands for Developer Experience and focuses on providing a toolchain and/or platform that helps developers to easily build, test and deploy software.
In serverless infrastructure for financial services, excellent DevEx is crucial for rapid innovation and agility, enabling developers to quickly build and deploy new features while minimizing operational overhead and ensuring compliance.
A smooth DevEx also helps attract and retain top engineering talent in a competitive market.
Alexander Rusa: Companies in the financial services industry profit a lot from the built-in compliance and security features that cloud providers offer for managed serverless services. The biggest challenge on the way there is probably adapting to a different way of designing software and empowering their IT experts to work with those modern managed services.
Another challenge can exist in integrating new serverless applications with legacy systems that are often deeply embedded in financial institutions. Careful planning of the strategy and architecture is key for a secure and scalable environment.
Alexander Rusa: A strong focus on DevEx can significantly mitigate the challenges faced by financial services adopting serverless.
A well-designed DevEx platform provides developers not only with template repositories for different types of applications, but also the whole “golden path” tool chain including development environments, CI/CD pipelines, security scanning, monitoring, documentation templates, infrastructure as code, deployment strategies and more.
Using this, developers can quickly start working on solving actual problems and get support by other teams due to adhering to internal standards.
This empowers IT experts and accelerates their learning curve, fostering a smoother transition to serverless architectures and promoting a culture of innovation.
Alexander Rusa: Especially in financial services it is important to always be compliant with certain standards and have a high level of security.
DevEx makes it easier for developers to adhere to those standards, but it also makes it easier to continuously evaluate the current state of compliance and security through tools and services that provide dashboards and notifications or even integrate with CI/CD pipelines and block deployments if they introduce new security or compliance issues.
Alexander Rusa: Excellent DevEx simplifies managing and monitoring serverless financial infrastructure, leading to faster deployments, fewer errors, and quicker recovery times. This directly supports DORA's operational resilience objectives by minimizing disruptions, improving change management, and strengthening incident response capabilities. Ultimately, better DevEx translates to more reliable and secure financial services.
Alexander Rusa: There are multiple challenges, like the stringent security requirements of financial institutions, integrating with existing security tools and frameworks, but also legacy systems, generation of meticulous documentation and audit trails, training and upskilling staff on DevEx topics and also resistance to change from existing teams.
Addressing these challenges requires a balanced approach. DevEx must be tailored to the specific needs and constraints of the financial services industry, while ensuring compliance with DORA's requirements for security, resilience, and auditability. This often means prioritizing automation, robust testing, and continuous monitoring to maintain both agility and control.
Alexander Rusa: Define clear SLAs and security requirements and select only third parties that can satisfy those requirements. Incorporate automatic security scanning and vulnerability analysis of third-party dependencies within mandatory CI/CD pipelines for each application. Use tools to track and manage third-party dependencies and alert on vulnerabilities or outdated versions. Extend monitoring to include third-party service performance and security.
Alexander Rusa: Technology and trends are changing very rapidly, but there are a few trends that will probably stay for a long time. One of the most important topics is automation. Compliance and security requirements will only become more and more restrictive and the only way to satisfy those requirements, without investing an ever increasing amount of work, will be automating compliance checks, security tests and audit trails in a way that you can be sure they will always be enforced blocking and alerting automatically in case issues arise.
Alexander Rusa: We helped one of our financial services customers to implement certain AWS cloud services, CI/CD pipelines and compliance policies. This was done in multiple ways:
This is still an ongoing process, but the customer has already profited a lot by improving security and compliance, gaining a much better overview of the overall status and being prepared and ready for external audits.
Alexander Rusa: The key challenges were probably many different applications that didn’t adhere to the same standards. This made it very difficult to maintain consistent security policies, track changes effectively for audit purposes, and ensure compliance with evolving regulations like DORA. Manual processes were slow and error-prone, increasing the risk of some projects not fully adhering to all requirements and maybe even security issues. Scaling infrastructure was also a challenge, as each application had its own unique deployment process, making it difficult to respond quickly to changing business needs. Essentially, they lacked a unified approach to development, deployment, and operations, hindering both agility and compliance.
Alexander Rusa: DevEx provided the unified approach they lacked. IaC standardized infrastructure, ensuring consistent security and simplifying audits. Automated security testing and dependency management reduced vulnerabilities and improved compliance. Centralized logging and monitoring enhanced visibility and incident response. Standardized deployments enabled faster scaling and more controlled change management, addressing both agility and compliance needs. Essentially, DevEx brought order and automation to their development lifecycle, bridging the gap between speed and regulatory requirements.
Alexander Rusa: One big improvement is the reduced time to release new features and bugfixes and reduced outages due to improved standards for testing and deployments. Before those improvements deployments and tests were often time intensive and error prone. Developers can now focus more on improving applications and less on deployment and release topics.
Alexander Rusa: Other organizations can learn that DevEx isn't just about speed and happier developers; it's crucial for compliance. Standardization, automation, and centralized visibility are key for both efficient development and meeting regulatory requirements like DORA. Investing in DevEx tooling and training pays off by improving agility, security, and auditability, ultimately reducing risk and fostering a culture of continuous compliance. Don't treat compliance as an afterthought; integrate it into the DevEx lifecycle from the start.
A strong DevEx strategy is essential for financial services adopting serverless infrastructure. It integrates automation, standardization, and security into the development lifecycle, directly supporting compliance with frameworks like DORA. Organizations prioritizing DevEx will experience faster releases, improved compliance, and greater resilience—critical advantages in an evolving financial landscape.
We help organizations implement DevEx best practices and ensure compliance with DORA. Our expertise in DevOps and serverless infrastructure empowers your teams to deliver faster, more secure, and compliant solutions.
Contact us today to learn how we can support your digital transformation journey.
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