The Monzo Bash event on 28th November was by consensus one of the best and most informative technical talks many of us had seen. Matt Heath (@mattheath), who has been involved on the project from the outset, gave us a warts-and-all overview of how they literally built a bank from a standing start.
Starting with a simple mobile application that allowed parties to exchange 'value', Monzo then built its prepaid debit card infrastructure around a distributed, micro-service based architecture; one that comes with many benefits but one that also comes with a lot of tradeoffs. There is no such thing as a free lunch in the world of micro-services and Matt delved right into gory inconvenient truths of modern distributed architectures : networking, debugging, testing, managing, and so on.
Slides for Matt's talk are now available online, but if you get a chance to hear Matt in person, we would strongly recommend it.
We can only thank Monzo for lending us Matt for the day, and also Matt for such an impressive talk and insight into his world. Thank you both.
