Monzo is nothing more than a science project
Monzo Stand-In
61–67 of 67 posts
Re: Monzo Stand-In
#62I 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…
So I've been spending a lot of time in the financial services/payment space and might be able to answer some of your questions. The EU activated the Digital Online Resiliency Act (DORA) last year (passed in 2023) which, amongst other things, mandates that financial services providers who run their core business functions in the cloud (i.e. Monzo) must be able to demonstrate that they are not entirely reliant on a sin…
It kind of makes sense that critical financial infrastructure would be one of the things that doesn’t just run on AWS and accepts it goes down with everything else when us-east-1 goes down
Re: Monzo Stand-In
#63By using another US hyperscaler for your backup platform you're still unhedged against US governance failure/breakdown.
You have no choice really if you’re a UK business, there is no UK (or French, or German, or Japanese for that matter) cloud that can do what AWS or GCP does
Re: Monzo Stand-In
#64Due to the recent outage where it didn’t work properly, this should be renamed Monzo Limp-In.
Simple Bank, when they were a thing, published this "look at how awesome we are" post about moving to Riak from Cassandra. (I think that's what it was; it's been a long time.) "We're going to be so reliable after this; big banks don't stand a chance" was what I took away from it. The migration went horribly. Tier 0 clusterfuck. Debit cards were completely unusable and they lost ledger data. That and the occasional du…
100% why I bank with an old bank that runs mainframes.
Re: Monzo Stand-In
#65By using another US hyperscaler for your backup platform you're still unhedged against US governance failure/breakdown.
You have no choice really if you’re a UK business, there is no UK (or French, or German, or Japanese for that matter) cloud that can do what AWS or GCP does
Really? None other than Airbus chose Scaleway (a personal favourite) for their migration of core services off AWS. There's also Hetzner, OVH, NetCUPs etc. I'd agree they're not AWS/GCP scale (yet) but as more big names move for reasons of EU sovereignty that multiplies available capital and soon they become hyperscale themselves. And sovereign.
Re: Monzo Stand-In
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I've been spending a lot of time in the financial services/payment space and might be able to answer some of your questions. The EU activated the Digital Online Resiliency Act (DORA) last year (passed in 2023) which, amongst other things, mandates that financial services providers who run their core business functions in the cloud (i.e. Monzo) must be able to demonstrate that they are not entirely reliant on a sin…
It kind of makes sense that critical financial infrastructure would be one of the things that doesn’t just run on AWS and accepts it goes down with everything else when us-east-1 goes down
So much stuff in AWS depends on us-east-1 being up; it's crazy.