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Monzo Stand-In

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Re: Monzo Stand-In

#11

Post by ricardobayes »

danpalmer wrote: post #7

I can't help but think this isn't the best idea, it raises so many questions. How does fail over work (it failed for me!), can you safely fail over, how does product think about the stack, is it funded well enough, how do you scale a system from zero to all traffic instantly, how do you effectively keep this environment warm, how do you determine which services are critical enough to be in it, how do you manage findi…

No, it's a great idea. Any systems engineer knows redundancy is good, even better if it's across providers. I see no issues with this from a system architecture point of view. As to how the implementation is done that's up to them to do right.

Re: Monzo Stand-In

#12

Post by danpalmer »

ricardobayes wrote: post #11
danpalmer wrote: post #7

I can't help but think this isn't the best idea, it raises so many questions. How does fail over work (it failed for me!), can you safely fail over, how does product think about the stack, is it funded well enough, how do you scale a system from zero to all traffic instantly, how do you effectively keep this environment warm, how do you determine which services are critical enough to be in it, how do you manage findi…

No, it's a great idea. Any systems engineer knows redundancy is good, even better if it's across providers. I see no issues with this from a system architecture point of view. As to how the implementation is done that's up to them to do right.

Redundancy is great, absolutely, but there are multiple ways to do it and this is not necessarily the right one.

Which is better: 3 DCs for 2 DCs worth of traffic, running the same stack but isolated failure domains... or 4 DCs for 2 DCs worth of traffic, that work in completely different ways, where 2 are left cold until needed. I can see some advantages of the latter, but not a lot.

This also isn't about fault tolerance at the code level like in, say, avionics. In those scenarios having multiple distinct implementations makes sense, but that's very different, you run all paths at the same time and check they agree etc.

Re: Monzo Stand-In

#13

Post by danpalmer »

IshKebab wrote: post #10

Monzo is great. Rare example of a consumer banking company that makes things easy. I just signed up for their phone service in literally 3 minutes. Didn't even need to talk to anyone to port my old number. I'm going to move all my ISAs and SIPP to them next I think.

> Didn't even need to talk to anyone to port my old number

That seems like pretty low stakes – I wouldn't expect to talk to anyone to sign up and transfer to a consumer service in the UK. I don't think I've spoken to anyone for something like this in the last 10 years or so.

Re: Monzo Stand-In

#14

Post by broadben12 »

IshKebab wrote: post #10

Monzo is great. Rare example of a consumer banking company that makes things easy. I just signed up for their phone service in literally 3 minutes. Didn't even need to talk to anyone to port my old number. I'm going to move all my ISAs and SIPP to them next I think.

This is either a bot comment, or you have a very poor understanding of the UK financial market. They are quite far down the leaderboard for ISA rates and SIPPs.

Re: Monzo Stand-In

#15

Post by StevenWaterman »

broadben12 wrote: post #14
IshKebab wrote: post #10

Monzo is great. Rare example of a consumer banking company that makes things easy. I just signed up for their phone service in literally 3 minutes. Didn't even need to talk to anyone to port my old number. I'm going to move all my ISAs and SIPP to them next I think.

This is either a bot comment, or you have a very poor understanding of the UK financial market. They are quite far down the leaderboard for ISA rates and SIPPs.

The parent comment didn't mention anything about ISA rates and SIPPs in terms of performance, they said that it was easy. You might disagree with their priorities but that doesn't change whether it's the right decision given those priorities

Re: Monzo Stand-In

#16

Post by YawningAngel »

danpalmer wrote: post #7

I can't help but think this isn't the best idea, it raises so many questions. How does fail over work (it failed for me!), can you safely fail over, how does product think about the stack, is it funded well enough, how do you scale a system from zero to all traffic instantly, how do you effectively keep this environment warm, how do you determine which services are critical enough to be in it, how do you manage findi…

I'm a bit curious about Spanner. At $EMPLOYER we were going to do multi cloud with multi-region CockroachDB clusters but gave up on it because write latencies and costs were too high. Do you not get the same thing with Spanner, where technically you can have multi region but it's very unattractive to actually do?

Re: Monzo Stand-In

#17

Post by OJFord »

danpalmer wrote: post #13
IshKebab wrote: post #10

Monzo is great. Rare example of a consumer banking company that makes things easy. I just signed up for their phone service in literally 3 minutes. Didn't even need to talk to anyone to port my old number. I'm going to move all my ISAs and SIPP to them next I think.

> Didn't even need to talk to anyone to port my old number That seems like pretty low stakes – I wouldn't expect to talk to anyone to sign up and transfer to a consumer service in the UK. I don't think I've spoken to anyone for something like this in the last 10 years or so.

I've never talked to someone for it, and I would've first done it in something like 2008. (It's 'always' been done by SMS, well before 'apps' that might let you (and I don't recall it on websites).)

Re: Monzo Stand-In

#18

Post by hurrrr »

danpalmer wrote: post #12
ricardobayes wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's a great idea. Any systems engineer knows redundancy is good, even better if it's across providers. I see no issues with this from a system architecture point of view. As to how the implementation is done that's up to them to do right.

Redundancy is great, absolutely, but there are multiple ways to do it and this is not necessarily the right one. Which is better: 3 DCs for 2 DCs worth of traffic, running the same stack but isolated failure domains... or 4 DCs for 2 DCs worth of traffic, that work in completely different ways, where 2 are left cold until needed. I can see some advantages of the latter, but not a lot. This also isn't about fault tole…

I've never run a bank either, but their current setup is very cost effective. A true multi cloud architecture would be "much" (a couple of 9s) more available, but I believe it would introduce other issues. The goal was to ensure the use of a subset of features for short periods of time, which is probably already above the market standard.

Re: Monzo Stand-In

#19

Post by spidermonkey23 »

IshKebab wrote: post #10

Monzo is great. Rare example of a consumer banking company that makes things easy. I just signed up for their phone service in literally 3 minutes. Didn't even need to talk to anyone to port my old number. I'm going to move all my ISAs and SIPP to them next I think.

they don't offer a phone contract..? this makes no sense

Re: Monzo Stand-In

#20

Post by pledg »

spidermonkey23 wrote: post #19
IshKebab wrote: post #10

Monzo is great. Rare example of a consumer banking company that makes things easy. I just signed up for their phone service in literally 3 minutes. Didn't even need to talk to anyone to port my old number. I'm going to move all my ISAs and SIPP to them next I think.

they don't offer a phone contract..? this makes no sense

Yes they do - https://monzo.com/mobile
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