I think this is what distributed systems has a phrase for: "graceful degradation".
Monzo Stand-In
41–50 of 51 posts
Re: Monzo Stand-In
#42> Monzo Stand-in is an independent set of systems that run on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Given the US Cloud Act, how Monzo is protecting customers' financial data from being accessed by foreign government without Monzo's knowledge? Everyone does it, does not excuse it. Also shows lack of faith in British business.
Which British businesses provide this sort of infrastructure?
I ask this as a Brit who ran stuff on a few UK providers, and ultimately moved to a cloud platform because of the combination of terrible service and lack of features. The landscape may have changed, but in my experience it was bleak circa 2020.
Re: Monzo Stand-In
#43I 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 think the biggest problem is the data consistency. Since they are planning for eventual consistency, should make it easier, but they most probably had to re-write code to support atomic operations and proper transaction isolations.
But the scaling problem is still there, when they switched over I assume they would start both horizontal and vertical scale of k8 pods and maybe even bump up DB instances as well which could result in a small congestion at the start of the switch over
Re: Monzo Stand-In
#44Just pointing out this is from February 2025, so has been a thing for a while
Re: Monzo Stand-In
#45[flagged]
Re: Monzo Stand-In
#46Monzo 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.
Same service with HSBC and Giffgaff here. Meh.
Re: Monzo Stand-In
#47I 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 think the biggest problem is the data consistency. Since they are planning for eventual consistency, should make it easier, but they most probably had to re-write code to support atomic operations and proper transaction isolations. But the scaling problem is still there, when they switched over I assume they would start both horizontal and vertical scale of k8 pods and maybe even bump up DB instances as well which…
Foundationdb has a good solution to this. Uses three regions, sync writes to regions 1 and 2 which should be near each other, sync writes to region 3. If region 1 dies then region 3 pulls last commits from region 2 before serving traffic. Small cluster manager runs in all three regions
Re: Monzo Stand-In
#48I 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…
monzo r the same guys who went in on micro services. at a time they were bragging 3 micro services per engineer. so yeah a lot of things don't make sense.
Re: Monzo Stand-In
#49There are 3 things I have in mind when reading this: - it should be so frustrating for a dev to work on a full core banking that is mostly useless and userless except maybe 1h every 3 years. - if you build a totally different implementation to handle high traffic transaction from third parties that don't operate for days or months, i would expect it to be fragile. Like for example suddenly you receive unicode special…
"it should be so frustrating for a dev to work on a full core banking that is mostly useless and userless except maybe 1h every 3 years." When other banks go down and Monzo stays up, even for 1 hour, that is a massive PR win and will bring in new customers. It's also been used multiple times as of the article (2025), and they are always exposing some users to it for testing.
I don't say that it is not useful, and that it is not a good thing for the company. More than I would be very frustrated to spend my life on that if it was my job.
Re: Monzo Stand-In
#50> Monzo Stand-in is an independent set of systems that run on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Given the US Cloud Act, how Monzo is protecting customers' financial data from being accessed by foreign government without Monzo's knowledge? Everyone does it, does not excuse it. Also shows lack of faith in British business.
Which British businesses provide this sort of infrastructure? I ask this as a Brit who ran stuff on a few UK providers, and ultimately moved to a cloud platform because of the combination of terrible service and lack of features. The landscape may have changed, but in my experience it was bleak circa 2020.
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