Technical conversation

Monzo Chat
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Hi All,

In the spirit of transparency, I was wondering if you can tell us more about Mondo from a technical perspective, after all, IT plays a huge part in a new bank.
I recommend this video to everyone interested in the subject while we wait for news from the team :slight_smile:

Thanks.

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What are you looking to know specifically? We’re more than happy to answer questions! :slight_smile:

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It might have been already posted but I would like to know what you’re running hardware wise , i.e. HP DL380 Gen 9, Cisco ASA etc etc

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Is it bad that I immediately recognised the exact system and approximate model @tom posted? I do far too much research… :cold_sweat:

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IBM Z13

How many you have?

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None, I’m afraid. I was joking! We run most of our application code in the cloud.

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lol @tom.

In seriousness though, it’s true that we’re massive fans of the cloud, and we run the vast majority of our software there :cloud:. But we do also have some physical equipment co-located in data centres, mostly because we need to connect physical lines from some third parties to our network. In fact, @matt and I visited one of our physical data centres yesterday where he took this lovely pic…

Yesterday.jpg2149Ă—1612 713 KB

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Love this photo. Great contrast, and the damn link lights on :wink:

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Equinix?

We have a a ton of kit spread over their data centers.

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Equinix?

Can’t say, I’m afraid :spy:

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Was gonna say if it is I might see you in there… :nerd:

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Matt gave a good description of the services in the video. I am curious to how you deploy them ?
Also, the platform, no matter how good it is will also depend on your providers for the different external services. Can we know who are they and what do they provide ? how important are they to the life cycle of the product.

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I am gonna say telehouse :slight_smile:

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I am curious to how you deploy them ?

We deploy all our services onto our cloud instances using Kubernetes. We have built some in-house tooling around this, but Kubernetes is doing much of the heavy lifting.

the platform, no matter how good it is will also depend on your providers for the different external services. Can we know who are they and what do they provide ? how important are they to the life cycle of the product.

The third-parties we connect to from our physical data centres give us access to things like inter-bank transfers and card payments, so they are really important. We don’t want our physical infrastructure to be the “weak link” in an otherwise strong system, so we apply the same philosophy we use when building our software: no single points of failure, and automation for everything. :robot: We connect to each provider from at least two data centres, and we can survive the loss of any location (in the cloud, or physically) :zap:

We also reduce the amount of hardware in these data centres to the bare minimum. For the most part, they are just “dumb” proxies from a third-party to the cloud, where the Mondo magic happens. :cloud:

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