Humanitec accelerates transformation for fintech Convera to a future-ready, cloud-native setup

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.