Product overview

IBM Financial Services Workbench provides collaborative tools that enable business analysts, developers, architects and operations teams to work together faster. It empowers developers in collaboration with subject-matter experts to focus on the core business logic of their solutions - and not loosing themselves in finding the right technology or connecting to a database. This results in a high developer productivity.

It is a low-code and pro-code solution development and composition suite - designed for the cloud. Within low-code projects, the methodology of Domain Driven Design helps to focus on the business challenges and to solve the complex challenges. Cloud native skills are not necessarily needed to build services, that run on OpenShift. Not only full-stack developers, but also "traditional" developers can drive your innovation on various stacks.

IBM Financial Services Workbench provides a model—driven Rapid Application Development (RAD) approach. Development is supported, guided, fast and easy. Solution design is entirely translated into code, using Design Pattern, building on a reference architecture with all necessary, generic plumbing code in place. Developers focus on the what, not the how.

Taking an opinionated approach towards a state-of-the-art solution architecture, IBM Financial Services Workbench empowers customers to bring their solutions to market in an efficient and timely manner. It does so by providing tailor-made tools for the different roles involved in designing, implementing and testing these solutions.

IBM Financial Services Workbench leverages best-of-breed open source tooling to offer a pre-integrated and automated pipeline, including packaging and auto-deployment, as well as monitoring capabilities.

product overview — Figure 1. open source and open architecture as core concepts

IBM Financial Services Workbench builds on a curated platform designed to provide choice and industry good practices, based on open-source technologies - connecting the dots on building composite applications.

The right components are pre-selected and integrated. However, individual requirements and preconditions can be adopted. It provides an out-of-the-box experience with the option for customization and component substitution.

Solution Designer

Solution Designer comprises a set of tools that allow solution creators, i.e. business analysts and developers, to work together seamlessly via a shared repository.

Most prominently, it features a no-code design tool that can be used to model business domains following the principles of Domain Driven Design. Developers can use the low-code support to implement the project based on the domain specification. Changes to the domain model will automatically be reflected in the generated code, so that developers can securely adapt the implementation to changed specifications.

Furthermore, Solution Designer provides access to a local marketplace to share domain specifications or import prebuilt domain specifications to jump-start the development of new projects.

Solution Hub

Solution Hub connects Solution Designer with the OpenShift projects where the developed projects are automatically deployed. In Solution Hub you have access to all connected OpenShift Projects of IBM Financial Services Workbench and also to the deployments. You can manage the build and/or deploy pipeline configurations. The predefined pipeline tasks contain extensive checks. This ensures that contained implementation code meets the domain model requirements, that dependencies are free of security issues, and that target environments meet implementation criteria. As part of the build process, projects are transformed into microservices that follow current best-practice architecture blueprints. Solution Hub additionally takes care of the configuration management.

Solution Envoy

By deploying Solution Envoy to an OpenShift project, you can run, manage and monitor projects built with IBM Financial Services Workbench. Solution Envoy promotes current best practices for successful operations such as log consolidation, monitoring, tracing, and metering. Running on Red Hat OpenShift, it paves the way for scalability and robust and secure operations.

Solution CLI

IBM Financial Services Workbench brings its own CLI tool to push and pull code from and to the Git repository, test and debug from a local machine into the OpenShift cluster and to keep the SDKs up to date.