Situation
SweetPay is part of Financial Tech Sweden since 2016 and is on a mission to enable a next-gen platform for fair payments.
SweetPay is a fast-growing business that wants to expand across different countries and continents. Their main challenge was to improve business and technical processes sustainably. Important factors in this challenge were the compliance and security regulations across different continents. From the IT perspective, this meant high availability, new approaches and state-of-the-art cloud solutions. With this plan being made, SweetPay concluded they did not have the knowledge, nor the experience to develop such solutions.
Approach
To execute this plan, SweetPay decided to partner up with Valcon in a nearshore collaboration. Having a strong team of senior developers (Java, React, AWS) and experienced DevOps professionals was a necessity. Valcon was able to design such a custom-tailored team of professionals, consisting of a senior DevOps professional and multiple senior Java engineers quickly, and the project was ready to get started.
Together with Valcon, SweetPay decided to follow the path of DevOps and to fully integrate AWS as a cloud provider in the IT infrastructure. The new approach meant more agility with SCRUM as the underlying methodology. The SCRUM approach led to regular feedback through sprint reviews directly from stakeholders, including customers, and enabled course corrections early, which is less costly and time-consuming than later in the process.
JIRA was selected as the main project management software and has been adjusted appropriately with dashboards, integration with Bitbucket and custom workflows that were loosely based on the Gitflow methodology. This led to a smoother overall workflow and has improved tracking and auditing within the IT department.
Results
As a result of well-established inter- and intra-company teamwork and high availability, replication, multi-region setups, and low-cost pay-as-you-go solutions became the norm.
- List
- Lower costs
- Improved speed and reliability
- Less technical issues
- More focus on improvements
By utilising the latest Spring boot (Java) offerings and AWS solutions like RDS, EC2 and Lambda speed and reliability of development and the software in production significantly improved. Having Elastic Cloud for logging and Prometheus for monitoring meant that both Valcon and SweetPay teams were in full control of the operations, resulting in fewer issues and more focus on improvements. A happier team leads to a better product!
