- Hello, and welcome to Community Chats.
I'm Aley Hammer, and today we're interviewing Vasanth,
the Director Of Engineering at OFX.
Vasanth, welcome to the show.
Can you start by telling our audience a little bit
about the role that OFX plays in the global payment space?
- Thanks, Aley, it's good to be here.
At OFX, we are an international money services provider
helping customers to move their money globally.
We've been operating in the space for more than 20 years
offering transfers in 50-plus currencies.
And so far we have moved more than $200 billion globally.
We started in Sydney, but we now operate worldwide
and have offices in major cities
with more than 400 staff.
At OFX, we strongly believe
in a fairer, better way to move money.
With our human-plus-digital business model,
we offer customers 24/7 client support
that's backed by our global digital platform.
- Well, I recently used your services, actually,
and I was so impressed by the 24-hour customer support.
It was really helpful.
Vasanth, at OFX you guys operate a global digital platform
as you mentioned,
so can you share a little bit more
about AWS's role in all of that?
- Sure.
I think one of the crucial thing
in operating a global digital platform
is to make sure it's available when the customer
and operators need it, right?
This means building application and services
that are reliable, scalable, and definitely secure, right?
With 100% of our application workload on the cloud,
AWS takes away the heavy lifting
in operating the infrastructure,
which means with the building blocks that AWS offers,
and the teams can provide innovative, new solutions
without worrying about managing infrastructure.
The interesting thing to me, personally,
is how we increase the cloud to its fullest extent.
And we do that by embracing everything AWS has to offer.
For example, we prefer managed service at every level
whether it's compute, network, database or storage, right?
This not only helps us reduce on the total cost of ownership
but also led the teams to focus on solving
innovative FX solutions, which we are an expert.
- It's been very cool to watch OFX utilize the cloud
and embrace nearly everything, as you say,
that AWS has to offer
and be open-minded to all the new services.
And Vasanth, OFX has had quite an amazing cloud journey
and your teams have learned so much along the way.
So are you able to share some
of the learnings that you've gained?
And also what I wanna know is around
building loosely coupled solutions.
- When we first started migrating to the cloud,
this goes back many, many years before my time.
I think our approach was more of a lift and shift
and re-platform, but as you know,
this is similar to an approach
that's usually been conducted by other organizations.
And we took a similar path.
But over the years,
we established internal product teams and boundaries.
So what I mean by boundaries is systems can only communicate
to other via API or events with the preference being
on the event side.
This allowed teams to independently build
an e-trade solutions and slowly break away from monolith.
I can give an example.
So payments, consider this a vertical,
and the engineering squad
effectively wants the end-to-end product space
of the payment life cycle.
This includes tracking, recipient management,
and making sure the recipient get paid on time.
The payment team
it utilizing the native tools that are available
in AWS built an end-to-end payment engine.
In this case, the workload runs on, as a container,
on Fargate or as a functions in Lambda,
and publishing events to SNS along the way.
By publishing events,
what it allowed our data team to independently
listen to those events and then build dashboard report
providing a business with a realtime possibility
of the end-to-end payment flow.
Similarly, we use DynamoDB and Aurora Serverless
as our data store, whereas in the past
we used to have a separate team who looks
after these databases and manage, upgrade and patch.
And now we no longer have to worry about all of those.
AWS takes care of that for us.
In saying that, we still have some workload
in EC2, and which we are planning to move away
in the coming months.
- Thank you so much for sharing.
And what are some of the initiatives that keep you
and the engineering teams currently occupied?
'Cause you've had such a journey up until now.
So I'm really interested
in what you're focusing on at the moment.
- Sure.
We have heaps of initiatives on our product roadmap,
but I can share a few themes.
We currently have an event flow, as I said earlier,
which where every system published the events.
At the moment we filter
and validate those events at a consumer level.
One of the things that team have done recently
is to move the filtering to SNS.
And in the immediate future, we are looking at moving
the schema validation to schema registry
which is available as part of AWS' EventBridge.
Similarly, we're planning to support multilingual
across our critical pathways, which means revisiting some
of the data store and then schema.
We also use CloudFormation
as our infrastructure provisioning tool,
and with the latest announcement with the CDK v2,
the teams are excited to try that out
and then move to CDK, wherever it makes sense.
Similarly, cost reduction has been a key limit.
I'm sure it's not for OFX but across the board
and you would agree, AWS being more on frugality
and making sure we spend money effectively.
I think we already have tagging
and auto shutdown of lower environments.
But what we are looking at as we progress is to
find more efficiency by porting some
of our application to ARM64 architecture,
indirectly, which means leveraging Graviton2 processor
that AWS has come up with.
There will be definitely some learning opportunities
along the way for engineers
and as well as the business can get some efficiency
and cost reductions along the way.
- My gosh, your teams definitely sound very busy
and it sounds like it will be a pretty big year
ahead for 2022.
And so to round up this interview, you work very closely
with the AWS enterprise support team, and especially
in the learning and development activities.
So can you share a little bit more about this partnership?
- Of course.
AWS been part and parcel my journey for the last 10 years,
and I have some amazing enterprise engagement with AWS
and the current engagement that we have with AWS
at OFX is no different.
We have access to many learning resources and solution
experts by working closely with AWS enterprise team.
Similarly, we engage AWS experts at every major initiative
here, including AWS being a critical member
of our working group.
Similarly, we ran an internal competition recently
to bring awareness among the engineers so that they can know
how to reach out to AWS and what level.
Further, we have recently announced a policy at OFX
where engineers can work anywhere in the globe
for three months.
That means they can comfortably do that,
knowing that AWS support is always there if we need it.
Further, like AWS support managers and solution architects
share their best practices architecture on various forums,
we run engineering goals every fortnight
and recently we had our time presenting an amazing talk
on event-based architecture.
And there are more in the cards this year.
- Well, I love that policy,
three months anywhere in the world.
I mean, I'm a mom now, so I don't know
if I'd take them up on it, but that's really cool.
But so thank you so much for joining us today.
It's been an amazing journey with OFX and AWS
and I really can't wait to continue to watch
and work with you as well.
So thank you so much.
If anyone has any questions, please pop them
in the comments section below and we'll get back to you.
Thank you so much, Vasanth.
- Thanks, Ali.