Lydtech Consulting - NorthWestern Mutual

Sector

Finance

The Client

A financial services company specializing in financial planning and wealth management

Deliverables

The Challenge

The client was undertaking a digital transformation project to create a unified payments experience to safely and easily move money between accounts and products. Orchestrating the integration of many discrete systems led the client to microservices and event based communication, an architectural pattern and technology set that they were not familiar with.  The challenge was to bring the team up-to speed with best practices for implementing an Event Driven Architecture utilising Kafka

Delivering Results

Success was measured not only by the successful delivery of parts of the system into the production environment, but by empowering the teams to develop and validate the event driven services independently

The Lydtech team worked in Architectural and Development capacities, embedded within the engineering team to advise on and deliver the client's requirements to the highest standard

Implementation

Designed and developed a system that could cater for the expected message volume by first taking in orders in bulk, and internally processing these orders individually to completion, with performance testing to prove the SLAs would be met. Exposed system vulnerabilities via load based testing

Investigated the existing implementations to establish the effort required to address any concerns, and developed a series of PoCs to validate alternatives

Worked alongside the development team to build out the solution, upscaling the developers through knowledge share sessions and pairing practices

What they said

Michael Weinand, Lead Engineer, Northwestern Mutual

We brought Lydtech in to help us get a jump start on Kafka. They were invaluable in helping us to avoid major pitfalls and did many deep dives on Kafka specific questions that nobody on our team would have been able to do. Their contributions to our automated testing strategy helped us to build a test platform that keeps us safe and helps us deploy new software to production daily. I would hate to know where we would have been without the Lydtech team. We might still be fighting to get the first production integrations working instead of well into our 5th

The Lydtech team worked closely with the client on the design of the buyer and a supplier integration. This close collaboration on the design and implementations allowed the client to enhance their implementation and take advantage of the team’s payments experience

Quality

Promoted quality via best practice testing approaches and big shift left of testing. Developed a new Component Test layer alongside the unit and integration tests to provide out-of-process integration assurance using mocks and simulators in a containerised environment that simulated Production

What We Did

Architectural Reviews - Reviewed the architecture for points of failure and areas of concern, provided mitigation strategies and alternatives where necessary, advised on technology choices and how these impact the resilience and complexity of the system
Messaging Expertise - Best practice messaging patterns and implemention alongside the team
Educate - Educated and guided the client in their adoption of micro services with Kafka. Highlighting areas of risk such as message loss, duplicate messages and their potential downstream impacts, message ordering, and handling message failures

The Outcomes

Architectural Reviews

Key architectural changes identified and implemented enabling a robust and resilient system

Quality at the forefront

Comprehensive testing harness implemented to provide high quality assurance

Continuous Deployment

Successful continuous deployment of new system to Production