NatWest Uses Kratix to Reduce Developer Cognitive Load and Enable Platform Co-creation
“Our goal is to reduce the cognitive load of our engineers. That’s really what it means. Not just for application developers, but for our platform teams as well. In the division I work in we’re using open-source tools like Kratix, GitLab, Flux.”
-Chris Plank, Enterprise Architect at NatWest
NatWest, one of Britain’s leading banks, provides a variety of retail, commercial and private banking services. As one of the top five UK banks, NatWest serves more than 19 million customers, 94% of whom manage their needs digitally.
To innovate for their external banking customers, the NatWest organisation as a whole needed to engage internally with enterprise-wide digital transformation. In a complex, heavily regulated environment with tens of departments, hundreds of teams and thousands of employees within a massive organisation, risks are high with serious financial and compliance implications for both business and consumer end users.
About NatWest
NatWest is one of top five banks in the UK, with more than 60,000 employees globally, serving over 19 million customers – and growing. One in four UK payments is processed by NatWest, with more than 750 million financial transactions happening per month. More than 94% of retail banking customers’ needs are now met digitally.
Location: Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Industry: Financial services and banking
Services used: Syntasso Kratix Enterprise
Integrations: Backstage, Terraform Enterprise (TFE and HCP)
Challenge
In this risk-conscious environment, NatWest explored how enterprise transformation could happen safely. As part of a years-long effort, the enterprise architecture team focused on reducing the time spent on the design-build-deploy journey and making things simpler for developers.
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Core goals included reducing environment provisioning times, increasing self-service capabilities, and reducing cognitive load across teams.
On the journey to simplifying, they created a library of 135+ different patterns that were designed to help guide developers towards getting their apps into production faster. However, these patterns eventually became bloated with duplications and inefficiency. In a giant organisation with competing demands, everyone is pushing their own requirements into the mix (e.g. security, governance processes, engineering practices, etc.), increasing the complexity exponentially for the centralised platform team.
Driven by a set of core NatWest leadership challenges – do things faster, do things simpler, enable inner sourcing and deliver centralised capabilities in a self-service way – the team continued to work on modernising their approach.
At the heart of this initiative, the aim was to help developers in a real way by giving them (and internal teams) the ability to self-manage their needs and reduce their cognitive load to deliver more value – faster.
Solution
The NatWest team investigated platform engineering and the concept of a platform as a product, which demanded a change in thinking. This process involved asking critical questions, such as, “Can we use a platform-as-a-product approach to deliver opinionated products to our customers in a self-service way?” and “How can existing platform teams as well as business teams contribute in a democratised way?” In addition, how could these shifts deliver 10x faster, and 4x more efficiently with end-to-end delivery in hours rather than days or weeks?
Internally, in answering these questions, they rethought the approach to how services are consumed to answer the question, “How can we make this simpler for our developers?” Thinking in new ways about the end-to-end developer experience shifted how the team thought about providing what developers needed. Instead of the increasingly convoluted 135 patterns that had to be applied in a prescriptive way, they thought instead about what it could look like to offer self-service to those business units who want to select pre-approved, pre-engineered, fully automated golden paths or products from a single centralised portal.
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“We do not want another new pattern. What we want is options from the developer portal so that developers don’t need to understand the underlying technology of all their choices. We want to take the need away for developers to do operational stuff and give them something they love, use and enjoy.”
- Chris Plank, Enterprise Architect at NatWest
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Building a self-service platform-as-a-product: Kratix framework
The platform-as-a-product approach proved to be a game changer for NatWest.
Building an internal developer platform using the Kratix framework for creating “everything-as-a-service” and Backstage for the developer portal, NatWest has built a truly democratised platform that brings together expertise from across the bank. The internal platform has been contributed to by multiple teams, demonstrating the true power of co-creating capabilities. This has included “Promises” (the Kratix API abstraction) created by database specialists, observability specialists, networking teams and more. These components and aspects are combined together to create “Compound Promises” which are essentially golden paths or “products” that can be internally consumed by developers.
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“The engineers in some of our business units know how to write Java applications really well. They don't know the latest AWS services, they don't know the latest Azure services. And they shouldn't need to know them. They just want to deploy their app and use it in a very simple way.”
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- Chris Plank, Enterprise Architect at NatWest
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Kratix offered the flexibility NatWest needed to build their platform to their own specifications. Kratix is designed to enable developers to ship applications at speed by enabling platform teams to make everything available as an “X-as-a-service” Promise. Developers can leverage existing Promises available in the Kratix marketplace and compose existing applications, services, and infrastructure components to meet their current requirements.
Kratix is API-driven and is an open framework whose core is built on creating Workflows in any language, making it easy for others to contribute and build on. Its flexibility allowed for easy integration with Backstage and other developer experience tools.
With Kratix, NatWest was able to achieve its three primary objectives for their developer portal:
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Build on-demand self-service capabilities
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Enable different teams to contribute to the platform using the technology they are familiar with (democratisation)
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Combine X-as-a-service Promises and deliver golden paths via Compound Promises for more compelling user experiences
“NatWest is using Kratix to simplify everything. The beauty of the Kratix model is that they are like LEGO building blocks. A Promise is a lot like a LEGO block – we can put them together and create value. We can start with simple use cases, start small, and iterate on that platform journey – building up those products over time, adding more features based on user needs, requirements, and feedback. And in so doing, we reduce the toil and cognitive load developers face, helping them be productive from day one. They can just go to this one portal, enter the information they know and need – and nothing more – and get what they want.”
-Chris Plank, Enterprise Architect at NatWest
Results
Adopting a platform-as-a-product approach has helped NatWest unlock a number of benefits, including focused collaboration with internal product owners to understand key blockers, delivering internal products that drive productivity and integrating technologies across teams. More specifically, the Kratix framework helped NatWest achieve three key results:
Self-service access to critical development tooling
Environment provisioning from months to minutes
Inner sourcing to maximise specialist expertise
Enabling co-creation of platform capabilities
Supported golden paths to reduce cognitive load
Simplifying developer experience with Compound Promises
Self-service provisioning with speed: In the pre-Kratix model, the time-to-value often saw weeks or months of delay in getting an environment to deploy to. With Kratix Promises, Kratix autogenerates templates and components that populate Backstage, which enables environment provisioning in minutes. ​​When a user sends a request through the Backstage portal, Kratix triggers a series of Workflows that are defined by the platform team to deploy the service. This fulfils NatWest’s objective to provide on-demand self-service access to services.
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Democratisation of the platform: Through the use of the Promise API abstraction, multiple teams across the bank have encoded their domain expertise into component Promises. These include specific capabilities such as databases, observability tooling, networking and more. These components are owned by the specialists who created them, reducing the cognitive load on the platform team. This fulfils NatWest’s objective to increase inner sourcing and enable the co-creation of capabilities.
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Golden paths for developers: Through the use of Kratix Compound Promises, the NatWest platform team has been able to combine component promises and aspects into pre-approved, pre-engineered, fully automated golden paths or products that developers can select. This means reduced cognitive load and increased efficiency for developers. This fulfils NatWest’s objective to provide golden paths and reduce developer cognitive load.
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