Maintaining quality at scale isn’t easy.
When the first McDonald’s restaurant opened in 1940, their milkshakes were made from ice cream and milk. With over 36,000 locations, those “milkshakes” include corn syrup and preservatives to maintain a consistent flavor according to the company website.
Scaling tech companies experience both cultural and technical challenges, and many (quite literally) cannot afford to make mistakes. Iterating quickly while still writing quality code and managing technical debt are of utmost importance for fast-growing engineering teams. At fintech company OppLoans, maintaining quality requires incorporating automation into nearly every aspect of their operations.
Credit-challenged consumers trust Opploans to obtain funding and personal loans. Staff Engineer Buc Rogers said customers expect security and regulatory compliances to always be met, no matter how big the company grows. By investing in the automation of their software delivery pipeline, Rogers said the business can handle more customers while maintaining a high level of security.
And it’s not just software builds and deployment getting automated: Because OppLoans is hosted by the cloud, they’ve been able to heavily automate the construction of entire environments.
How is your company leveraging automation to streamline or simplify specific tasks or areas of the business?
As a lender, we hold ourselves to very high standards for security and regulatory compliance. Without proper automation, those standards can really slow down a development process. We’ve invested heavily to automate as much of our software delivery pipeline as possible. The hard part of a development project should be getting that first version working. Unfortunately, sometimes it can be even harder to just get the system up and running in production. We’re investing in the automation required to make deployment painless for our developers.
This starts with CI orchestration of automated builds, tests and static analysis checks, culminating in a deployment-ready artifact. From there, a CD pipeline is used to automate auditable rolling or blue-green style deployments, supporting fast roll-forward or rollback. Data and ETL pipelines are managed by a workflow management tool.
We ensure rapid notification and speedy recovery from any issues in production or test environments by deriving automated alerts from metrics, logs, error analysis, security scanning and threat-detection tools.
We’ve invested heavily to automate as much of our software delivery pipeline as possible.’’
What tools or technologies have you implemented to drive automation in your business?
Because OppLoans is hosted by the cloud, we’ve been able to heavily automate not just software builds and deployments, but also the construction of entire environments. We don’t spend much time on traditional scaling concerns such as scaling with an increase in user or business volume. Instead, we think about scaling in the sense of maintaining the simplicity of the overall environment while the complexity of the deployed services continues to increase. We want to make sure that it is as easy to roll out the 60th microservice as it is to rollout the 3rd microservice.
We use Terraform to define and deploy version-controlled static AWS infrastructure, GitHub Actions and Jenkins for CI/CD pipelines. We typically deploy to EKS, ECS/Fargate, Lambda and Salesforce.
Test-automation tools and frameworks utilized include RSpec, clojure.test, Apex Unit Tests, Python unittest, Cucumber and Selenium. There is automatic linting and other static analysis applied during CI/ CD pipeline stages using Rubocop, bikeshed, TFLint and others.
We also use many automated security checkers, such as AWS Config, prowler, Cloud Custodian and others. There’s an entire ecosystem of monitoring tools and alerts that help our teams move faster and more safely. We’ve made big strides in making it easy to verify our software is performing as expected in production.
