Nets achieves strong DevOps mentality
Nets Easy is the newly developed and fully modernized e-commerce platform, which is more flexible for merchants and also makes the payment process easier for consumers.
Introduction
Nexi, which Nets is a part of, is a leading European Paytech company delivering the simplest, fastest, and most secure payment solutions to individuals, businesses, and financial institutions throughout Europe. Nexi aims to promote the transition to digital payments (away from cash). They handle payments for e-commerce merchants in a separated and encrypted flow, ensuring that the payment and payment information cannot be tampered with.
A quick and easily customizable checkout is crucial for the merchant to maintain a high conversion rate—and that is what Nexi delivers with their Nets Easy.
Nexi is a modern technology company and a leader in PayTech due to their ability to translate technological innovation into concrete customer benefits, for both merchants as well as banks.
Challenge
Nets has been delivering services based on technology for over 20 years and has been on a modernization journey away from mainframe, Unix, decentralized systems, ix86, cloud on-premises, and now towards public cloud. Nets’ services and products are technology-based, and therefore modernization has been a natural path for the development of services as new technology constantly creates new development opportunities.
Nexis’ ambitions for expansion in Europe are high. They would never be able to keep up, build data centers and infrastructure at the same pace as their goals, so they needed cloud capacity to help them reach their goals.
There were several benefits to embarking on this modernization journey. Cloud comes with many advantages, such as in the development phase (including reduced developer time due to increased standardization, reduced costs due to a more dynamic approach to both testing and production scalability). It is always underestimated how much stakeholder management these types of transformations involve. When you talk about people, processes, and technology, it is always the people part that requires the most. But technology can help. Therefore, the focus is on providing autonomy for developers to achieve a good flow for the different teams and avoid friction and complex dependencies. With the standardization and momentum that comes with the transition to Azure, they are focusing on automating more processes and taking another step forward.
Nets wanted faster time to market with new customer proposals and to give developer teams more autonomy and operational freedom, for example, they wanted to reduce the time to deliver services to new locations and reduce costs.
Achieving an “End-to-end DevOps approach” from infrastructure as code to application development and monitoring was also a goal in itself.
"Moving our Nets Easy product to a cloud platform has given us the ability to roll out the product faster in the markets we operate in than if we had relied on a legacy IT setup."
Solution
Nets already used Microsoft products for their internal corporate IT systems (Office, collaboration, etc.) so continuing with Microsoft was an easy choice for their product IT. Therefore, Microsoft technology became the basis for both compute/storage capacity (IaaS) and container loads (CaaS/PaaS).
They evaluated hyper-scale versus cost, the advantage of the innate functionalities, the speed of development and the language of development, after which Azure emerged as the natural choice.
Nets wanted both to migrate the payment solution Nets Easy to Azure, and at the same time to consolidate their other payment solutions, including the public, Danish payment solution Nets DIBS as well as a number of other foreign payment solutions in e.g. Norway, Finland and Germany. The future European payment platform across national borders should simply be Nets Easy. The Azure services helped to achieve efficiency and time to deploy in the Azure environment. Speed in development and time-to-market were also advantages of the chosen technology (e.g. App Service). Simplification in operation with Cosmos DB – SLA, infinite scalability, no operation, DevOps – CI/CD infrastructure as code for test-driven development, Enterprise-scale landing zones was the key to onboarding many teams on a large microservice platform.
Skaylink, heavy Microsoft partner for many years with an extensive Azure experience, was chosen as the ideal partner for Nexi. Skaylink demonstrates great results with Azure for all their financial clients and has a solid collaboration with Microsoft regarding compliance and security.
Process
It was a good experience for all parties of working together. Nets also worked closely with Microsoft’s internal architects to double-check architectural decisions. In addition, the close collaboration with Azure Firewall worked well to ensure that everything was in line with Nets’ security framework and European banking authority standards.
Solutions implemented
Fact: Nets Easy is developed using Microsoft technologies and data services such as:
- Azure App Service
- Azure CosmosDB
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
- Azure DevOps
- Azure API Management
- Azure Web Application Firewall
- Azure Monitor
Outcome
The cloud solution enables Nets to leverage the many functionalities already developed and available on the cloud platform, making it ready to use in Nets’ own product line and to build new services. This means faster development loops, which is of high value.
Nets has moved from an old-fashioned Linux-based relational database to a document-based data model based on domain-driven design, which can easily scale to cover the whole of Europe. The distributed architecture for multi-regional implementations covers all countries in the EU.
Nets has developed a strong development mentality and embraced the “you-built-it, you-run-it” method as their new fundamental philosophy.
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