About Convera
Convera’s goal is to help businesses navigate the complexity of global commerce. The financial services company enables 30,000 customers to move money around the world simply, securely, and smartly. Services range from sending and receiving foreign exchange (FX) to managing FX risk, managing student funds to enabling international payments.
The challenge
Convera are on a mission to transition to a future-ready, next-generation fintech. To achieve this, they needed to undergo a complete strategic transformation across the organization. This meant modernizing their entire business including people, skills, and processes by replacing all legacy systems and tools that no longer met their business needs with new technology. The end goal was to turn old apps into modern microservices-based cloud-native apps and migrate to AWS, with the right partner to support their journey. To accelerate their modernization, Convera needed a partner to work with both their engineers and developers, and be there every step of the way. Typically, the team would have cobbled together a Terraform-based solution, which would require hiring a team of cloud engineers who are expensive and hard to find. Instead, the fintech wanted to leverage their existing talent but upscale skills, rather than reinventing everything from scratch.
To meet their goals, Convera needed to overcome the following challenges:
- Build an Internal Developer Platform that would support their cloud migration and app modernization towards a microservice-based architecture
- Enable developers to choose their preferred level of abstractions for optimal developer self-service and productivity
- Streamline Ops without compromising on quality or security
“Not only did we need a product, we needed world-class support for that product to help us navigate our journey to modernize the entire organization.”
However, with a distributed microservice running in a cloud-native environment, things were not simple. Convera were in need of a partner who could deliver a state-of-the-art setup and a shortcut to get there, and a product that enables best practices in modern cloud-native engineering by design. With limited in-house capacities, the fintech chose Humanitec for their Platform Orchestrator offering, which sits at the core of an Internal Developer Platform (IDP). Humanitec was also chosen as a trusted advisor, recognized by Convera as a pioneer in the platform engineering space.
“Humanitec has helped us accelerate our modernization journey. Thanks to the Platform Orchestrator our developers can self-serve everything they need to be productive. This means we no longer have to recruit an entire team of experienced platform engineers that are expensive to hire, and extremely hard to find.”
From a DevOps perspective, Convera's focus is on modernizing its digital delivery pipeline. This includes transitioning to a microservice architecture, automating operations, and improving developer experience (DevEx). The fintech wanted to build an IDP to efficiently manage their microservice-based applications. Without this, developer experience (DevEx) was suffering, productivity was stifled and ultimately, lead times were slowed. This is because the flow from commit to production was tedious and time-consuming. Much manual effort was required and developers would typically need to wait for Ops support. On top of this, the team found themselves spending too much time deep-diving into Kubernetes (K8s).
To solve this, Convera wanted to streamline the flow from commit, push, merge request, and review, to production. They wanted to ensure that once a merge request was approved, no human intervention would be needed for promotion to production. In doing so, Convera could enable greater developer autonomy, easy usage, and fast onboarding.
The solution
The Humanitec Customer Success team focused on understanding the needs and desired outcomes of the Convera technical and business teams. From here, they were able to help Convera build an enterprise-grade IDP with the Platform Orchestrator at its core, supporting a cloud-native and best practice-focused system architecture.
Humanitec also assisted with designing developer golden paths, and planning the required technical lift for the migration.
“We didn’t want to replicate the status quo, this simply wasn’t good enough. Humanitec helped us build the foundation to the next generation in modern cloud-native software engineering.”
With the Humanitec Platform Orchestrator, Convera is now able to define clear golden paths for its developers. Developers no longer have to waste time figuring out underlying technologies like Kubernetes when promoting workloads from local to production, have the ability to choose their own level of abstraction, and can work more autonomously. As a result, developers can dedicate more time to new features and delivering greater value, because of their ability to self-serve. This also lowers developer cognitive load, leading to a better DevEx and higher levels of productivity— which reduces time to value and improves overall efficiency.
"With Humanitec, our developers don't need to touch Kubernetes unless they want to. This eased a lot of pressure from the team, allowing them to focus on what they do best — creating amazing solutions for our customers."
Results
- Increased feature release velocity, shorter time to value
- Less human error, stronger security and infrastructure consistency
- Improved overall efficiency, productivity, and customer value
The outcome
From an organizational perspective, Convera has transitioned to a future-ready, next-gen fintech. Their strategic transformation spans the entire business, with modernization resulting in new microservices-based cloud-native apps on AWS. Thanks to their partnership with Humanitec, Convera managed to avoid spending time and budget on new talent. Instead, the fintech has been able to use existing skills and build an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) to support their cloud migration and app modernization goals.
By seamlessly integrating the Humanitec Platform Orchestrator Convera is able to enhance its IDP’s developer self-service capabilities and streamline the entire software delivery process. Developers can now choose their preferred level of abstraction and access all the tools they need which has resulted in a better DevEx and increased productivity. Thanks to standardization by design, the risk of human error is greatly reduced which helps ensure stronger infrastructure-wide compliance and consistency.
"We were looking for a solution that was safe, fast, and cost-effective. Humanitec checked all these boxes for us. It allowed us to streamline our operations without compromising on quality or security."
As a result, developers are now able to create, test, and deploy a new service without any support from Ops or the cloud engineering team. These enhanced self-service capabilities have led to a clear separation of concerns, allowing the team to drive productivity, velocity, and ultimately — customer value.
Timeline and evaluation
- Target architecture design: 3 weeks
- Platform MVP delivered: 14 days
- Full integration: 8 weeks
- 80% of apps ported after 3 months
- Onboarding a new developer: 40 minutes
