- Hello, and welcome to Community Chats.
I'm Aley Hammer and today we're joined with Paul Thompson
from TYRO Payments.
Paul, welcome to the show.
Can you start by telling our audience
a little bit about TYRO Payments?
- Yeah, so TYRO Payments is, as it sounds,
a payments company.
We started out as offering acquiring only in 2003
and eventually grew to become all full banking
range of banking products for businesses across Australia.
So deposits, loans, and obviously acquiring,
along with health claiming and private claiming and rebates.
- And Paul, Tap, which is TYRO's app platform,
builds on AWS as a true rocket ship
and I've seen so many of our specialist solution architects
being completely blown away with the technology.
I know you're really humble, Paul,
but can you tell us a little bit about the cloud journey
with Tap?
- Sure, So Tap is TYRO Application Platform.
It's our app platform for running containerized workloads
on top of EKS with Istio.
I guess it is, took our learnings from on premise
and running microservices there,
and then leveraging, you know,
the open source tools that exist today
to make that whole thing a better experience
and I guess the interesting bits of it is
we sort of jumped on the GitOps bandwagon quite early,
a couple years ago,
and built that out by also building a couple
of abstractions on top of Kubernetes in SDO
to help make the experience better
for our product engineers.
So one of those things is called Schooner,
which is a Kubernetes operator that abstracts away, sorry,
Kubernetes in SDO for a couple of reasons.
So it gives a nicer interface for product engineers
to deal with when running their workloads on top of Tap.
Be it via, you know, sensible default configuration
and just nicer things to reckon with,
not having to become experts in the underlying technology.
But it also helps our platform team
because they're no longer having to get product engineers
to upgrade things when we want to change
like SDO versions,
if SDO were to deprecate some API's.
Now the Schooner interface that sits in the middle,
kind of acts as an adapter between the two
and allows the platform team to move freely,
stay up to date and stay on top of what we've, sorry,
the latest versions of Kubernetes and SDO,
and again, empowering the product engineering teams
to kind of leverage those features.
As we've continued along the GitOps journey,
we've also introduced Argo CD
as a way to synchronize desired state
with our clusters, as per the GitOps sort of principle
and again, we introduced another operator
for that as well called Slipways,
keeping with the nautical theme, and it is basically,
again an abstraction over some of the Argo CD details.
It just gives teams a nice interface to just say
this is where my manifests live,
and not have to worry about, you know,
all of the specifics of how to configure Argo,
and it will just deploy them to the appropriate clusters.
- There have been so many awesome learnings
from the Tap technology.
So thank you so much for sharing and Paul,
what are some of the initiatives that keep you
and the engineering teams occupied
'cause I know you guys are slammed at the moment.
- Sure, so I guess apart from ongoing maintenance
of the Tap cluster and, you know,
constantly upgrading Kubernetes and SDO,
which are quite fast moving pieces,
we are looking at a couple of things.
One being our POS integration, which is something
that comes from the early days of TYRO
and it's one of TYRO's big selling points,
is the amount of POS we integrate with.
The technology that was built on has served as well
for the last 10 plus years.
But now we are looking at how we can basically reimagine it
to scale for the next 10
and one of the ways we're doing that is by looking at
AWS IoT as a platform potentially for doing this.
So I guess that combined with device management,
which terminals and POS's wouldn't traditionally
be things you would imagine is IoT type devices,
but then when you look at the way we interact with them
and what we have to do with them,
it does quite fit that model nicely.
So we are investigating the IoT platform,
doing a bit of a proof of concept
and spike on that at the moment
and some of the, you know, monitoring device management
and rules and things that are built into that service
seem to be quite nice tools for the job
we need to achieve with them.
- Those are some really cool projects keeping you guys busy
and I guess what I wanna know is if we had to wrap up
this interview, what would you like to have built
over the next two, three years?
- Sure, so one of the major things we're looking at doing
is revamping our whole CICD pipeline.
It was built at the beginning of our cloud journey,
back in 2018, but as time has gone on,
there's been a lot of movement in the industry
that we would like to, you know
leverage some of the new tooling that's come out.
We wanna reimagine the whole thing as a sort of
event driven process,
leveraging a lot of AWS services,
but also leverage a lot of the tooling
and things have come out now around supply chain security
and providence.
So things like Project SIG Store
and tools like the framework, like In-Toto
and tools like Cosign to basically look at
how we improve our security posture.
So signing artifacts all the way from source
and testing to them before they run in production
and then along with that, I guess improving
the developer experience to improve
the sort of the dev feedback loop.
So as you know,
you move to a more and more cloud based world,
things where you would used to do a lot of local testing
on your machine have less validity
because you now need to test against services
and in the, you know inside of different environments,
Kubernetes.
So there's tools like Tilt and Scaffold,
which aim to solve that problem
by allowing you to quickly synchronize changes locally
into a running cluster,
test your changes fast without having to go
through a whole CICD pipeline,
before you get to just validate
the thing that you've written works.
So we were looking to basically improve the dev experience
and better speed up the dev feedback loop
or tighten the dev feedback loop,
basically to improve the develop experience
and help them leverage the cluster better.
- Paul, thank you so much for coming on the show.
I know so many companies out there will really learn a lot
from TYRO and your journey with AWS
and if anyone does have any questions,
please pop them in the comment section below,
and we'll get back to you.
Thanks so much for joining us.
- Thank you.