Making Money Matter with Cloud Native technologies
NOTICE: Originally posted on June 2nd 2017. We were known as ‘Lunar Way’ until late 2019.
There’s been many questions revolving around the philosophy of how we build software at Lunar Way. If you have spent time in the IT community, you may have heard of buzzwords like Cloud, Microservices, Agile, Containers, and many more. But we don’t want to stop there, even though the listed words would be a dream for many to conquer, we want to take it to the next level. We want to be Cloud Native.
What does that mean?
It means that we build features as small isolated services with a single purpose, we package these services in containers (the software ones), and lastly we deploy these containers dynamically on a set of machines running in the cloud.
How does this compare to regular banks? The old paradigm in the software world is building systems as big monolithic systems, and deploying once a month, once every three months, or even every half a year.
We are not a regular bank, in fact, we are not a bank at all. We are something else. We have a partner bank in each country, leveraging their banking infrastructure and then building on top of this foundation. As a result of this approach all core banking functionality is kept in the partner bank — which allow us to build all the cool features on top that will help you Make Money Matter.
The approach of being born in the cloud, and being Cloud Native gives us a long list of benefits, both for us internally, but also for our customers. One of the biggest benefits is the clear separation of concerns between our services. This allow us assign a set of people to work dedicated on new features across functions, making sure to cover all angles of that feature. These teams, or squads, as we call them internally, are responsible for all things surrounding that feature. This is similar to the approach phrased by Werner Vogels, VP & CTO at Amazon.com; “You build It, You Run It”. This way of separating features into specific services that can be deployed individually and autonomously, makes the feedback loop a lot shorter, and in the end, resulting in better features for our customers.
The infrastructure
The fintech industry is fast paced. Being able to release new features as fast as possible is very important. Sense of fucking urgency is a key element in everything we do. Therefore, we need an infrastructure supporting our work philosophy, and this is where the cloud native technology is very useful. Our infrastructure, allow us to do rapid deployments, it allow us to easily scale.
Many of these cloud native technologies originates from what big web scale companies have been doing for the past ten years, such as Google. cloIn fact one of the key elements in our infrastructure, Kubernetes, is built by Google and open sourced back in 2014.
The first meet-up in Denmark
Tuesday, May 30th we hosted the first event in the new meet-up community in Denmark surrounding these Cloud Native technologies (Cloud Native Aarhus).
I gave a presentation of how we at Lunar Way use these technologies and the benefits that we gain from this approach.
This is a first step towards engaging us more in the community and sharing our experiences with developing software at a high pace.
Slides from the event can be found here.
NOTICE: Originally posted on June 2nd 2017. We were known as ‘Lunar Way’ until late 2019.