61–70 of 106 posts
Do you completely rely on AWS? I.e. if amazon goes bust your company also dies? Or are you just using AWS as a provider of VMs, and could move to rackspace or linode.
It runs just fine on all the major clouds, bare metal, etc.
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I'd say the reliability the bank is looking for is much higher than what's acceptable for web companies (i.e. web companies are fine with eventual consistency, which would is obviously unacceptable in a banking system outside of trivial non-core features).
I'd also suggest that it's not just scale; the kind of reliability Facebook needs is fundamentally different than what a bank needs. Broadly speaking, Facebook needs the site to keep working as well as possible even if some subservice fails, and a bank needs a subservice not to fail. I'm summarizing here and I know it; clearly neither of them is actually on the absolute extreme end, as Facebook needs authentication t…
As long as ATM requests always work, nobody really seems to care.
As an aside, as a Monzo beta tester I can't say enough good things. Currently travelling around Asia and the card works almost everywhere and I pay 0 fees and get the exact Master Card rate. Twice now I've landed with 0 cash in the airport and been fine. I've used the card in over 10 countries outside UK with This is just a small benefit but when you put the whole product/experience together from the app + in-app cus…
Kudos for having the brass balls to actually execute a conversation that has probably happened a million times in every City pub.
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It seems common knowledge these days among the slightly but not too technically inclined that any new major project should use a LAMP stack as its base. People see Facebook, Amazon, and many others running PHP & MySQL on Linux at scale and they know it works reliably, so while it may not have the support of Cisco or Oracle, it is pretty close on the 'no one ever got fired for choosing' X scale, since you can point to…
I'd say the reliability the bank is looking for is much higher than what's acceptable for web companies (i.e. web companies are fine with eventual consistency, which would is obviously unacceptable in a banking system outside of trivial non-core features).
When they post a new Instagram photo, they expect that their friends will see it basically instantaneously.
In comparison, when people use their debit card at CVS, they're not expecting anyone to log into their bank account seconds later and see the charge show up.
I would think correctness is more important than speed in a retail consumer bank.
Or do I misunderstand what you mean by eventual consistency?
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I'd say the reliability the bank is looking for is much higher than what's acceptable for web companies (i.e. web companies are fine with eventual consistency, which would is obviously unacceptable in a banking system outside of trivial non-core features).
Why would eventual consistency be unacceptable in a banking system? In my experience people interact with social media on far shorter time scales than their banks. When they post a new Instagram photo, they expect that their friends will see it basically instantaneously. In comparison, when people use their debit card at CVS, they're not expecting anyone to log into their bank account seconds later and see the charge…
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Not that I don't appreciate the subject matter, I wave the flag for K8S all the time and I've shipped bank product presentation stuff on it... But... The fundamental challenges of building a bank are almost entirely orthogonal to things like distributed system uptime and resiliency (unless, I suppose, you could lose consistency during the types service loss Kubernetes makes easy to ameliorate). Evidence for this abou…
>what really limits most financial institutions from embracing a lot more modern tech is their core systems of record AND the acceptance of said systems by their governing agencies. Let me put this even more bluntly: if your bank's technology plan isn't 99.5% about dealing with government regulation and maintaining core record integrity and auditability, you are not a serious player in the space.
Do you completely rely on AWS? I.e. if amazon goes bust your company also dies? Or are you just using AWS as a provider of VMs, and could move to rackspace or linode.