Blueprint Series: Banking In The Cloud – Ultra-high Reliability Architectures
- 1. BANKING IN THE CLOUD: ULTRA-HIGH RELIABILITY ARCHITECTURES Jason Maude - Head of Technology Advocacy @jasonmaude
- 3. “Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff you are not moving fast enough.” Mark Zuckerberg
- 4. “Gringotts was the safest place in the world for something you wanted to hide” Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J K Rowling
- 5. A tale of banking woe
- 6. If you develop, you break things
- 8. Who are Starling Bank? • Tech start-up with a banking licence • ~100% cloud-based, mobile-only • Mastercard debit card • DDs and faster payments • Location-enriched transaction feed • ApplePay, GooglePay, FitBitPay... • Spending insights • Granular card control • Open APIs & developer platform
- 9. We built a bank in a year • Jan 2014 - Founded by Anne Boden • Jun 2014 - Kick-off with Regulators • Sep 2015 - Technical prototypes • Jul 2016 - Granted a partial banking license • Nov 2016 - Launching the alpha app • Feb 2017 - Launching the beta app • Apr 2017 - Granted a full banking license • May 2017 - Public launch • Mar 2018 - Awarded Best British Bank
- 11. Why not the monolith?
- 12. Recovery in distributed architectures
- 16. DITTO architecture (do idempotent things to others)
- 17. DITTO architecture • Do everything at least once and at most once • Retry (at least once) • Idempotency (at most once) • Work towards correctness, eventual consistency • Reduce synchronicity to a minimum • Save all requests to the database first • Keep the smarts in the services, not in the pipes • No distributed transactions • Do not trust other services
- 19. Instance termination is safe
- 20. Continuous(ish) delivery of back-end • Continual deployment to non-prod, sign-off into prod • Auto build, dockerise, test, scan, deploy < 1h • Code released to production up to 5 times a day
- 22. The “rolling” giphy • Our auditors loved this one • Yes it’s in our release documentation • Clear signal in engineering channel that is release in progress
- 23. … and if something goes wrong...
- 24. Chaos
- 25. IN CONCLUSION
- 26. Thank you! Check out the Starling Developer Podcast! https://developer.starlingbank.com @jasonmaude