SRE Teams #7: Dock
Lessons learned from building a company 100% on AWS Lambda and using modern cloud technologies to innovate at a fast-moving Fintech.
👋 Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of SRE Teams — a newsletter where I share how interesting companies are implementing Site Reliability Engineering and DevOps practices.
I got the chance to chat with Renato, lead SRE; Gustavo, senior engineer; and Jeff, architecture lead. They all work at Dock, a company with over 200 people. We talked about how they are using modern cloud technologies to innovate at a fast-moving fintech.
Company
Dock is a company from the Conductor group. They provide banking APIs as a service with over half a million dollars of payments processed and 1 million active cards using their backend.
Team
One hundred people work in technology at Dock, split into three main groups: SRE, architecture, and product engineering. SRE is in charge of the platform and supporting mission-critical applications. The architecture team builds tools to speed up developers. Product engineering interface with the business to gather business requirements and build them.
The SRE team has twelve people, seven working in the platform and five working on helping product engineering with their systems’ support. Architecture has five people, all working on building internal libraries and designing guides. They spread the guides and libraries for adoption across the product teams.
Stack
Most of Dock's applications run on AWS Lambda. The platform was born 100% using Lambda, and now they are migrating some workloads to AWS EKS. They use SQS and SNS for event-based communications between microservices. Postgres is the central database, but they also use DynamoDB for some use cases and Redshift for data analytics. Logs, metrics, and traces are in Datadog.
The messaging architecture allowed them to reduce the processing time of a routine from 7 hours to 40 minutes. They had many batch jobs doing heavy processing during the nights. But with the increase in volume, they started taking longer and reaching the mornings. They re-architectured the jobs to be event-based. Now, most of the processing happens in real-time. A single nightly job only aggregates computations made during the day.
Delivery
The Cloud team released a new delivery pipeline that is bringing together all areas of the business. It starts with product specifications created in Jira. Integrations with Github connects every Pull Request to the feature in Jira. When engineering finishes, the workflow automates QA, changelogs, and deployments. The pipeline generates changelogs for specific clients based on impact.
Ops
Product engineers are in charge of everything, from infrastructure to running applications. The Cloud team helps them in a consulting model to speed things up. When a new project or challenge comes up, someone from the Cloud team will work with that squad to get it off the ground.
Recent Success
Integrating PIX and complying with all security and standards requirements. The whole company had to come together, and although they had little time, it was one of the highest quality projects they ever delivered. The project even included a new delivery pipeline with PIX-specific requirements.
Recent Challenge
The PIX integration was both a big success and a challenge. Dock had a small amount of time to finish a company-wide project that required partner integrations and required more than just application code. The teams had to create new infrastructure for connecting with partners, networking, delivery pipelines, applications, and more.
Advice
Collaboration allows Dock to use modern technology with speed. As a Fintech, security is a top priority. But instead of adding roadblocks, the security team at Dock acts as a trusted advisor. They are eager to use new technologies that solve real problems. The team works together with other areas to find a safe path through the adoption of new technology. Their goal is to leverage tools that enable teams to get more autonomy without breaking security and compliance requirements.
If you liked the challenges, Dock is hiring for many roles. Check our their open positions.
Thanks
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That’s it for this week! Hit me up if you have any thoughts, feedback, or insights to share. Otherwise, see you next week!