Ooredoo Fintech, Doha, Qatar: Build Once, Deploy Everywhere

Total 457 words used.

Ooredoo FinTech International (OFTI)  is building a digital wallet application called walletii (inspired by the Arabic for “my wallet”). Currently this application is live in the Oman market, but OFTI is working on bringing the same application to different markets across the MENA region.   

Such an undertaking is not without challenges, as there are different regulatory environments, different technology partners and different integrations to navigate. For instance, in Qatar, it is possible to use a cloud environment, whereas in Oman it wasn’t, so an on-premise deployment was required.   

The development timelines are short, so infrastructure needs to be provisioned quickly, and budgets need to be controlled, so we don’t want underutilisation of our environments. On-premise buildouts take a long time.  

So OFTI attempted to square this particular circle by leaning heavily into creating their business and integration architecture around:  

• Microservices  

• Containerisation  

• Open Source Platforms  

• Build Pipelines  

With the ambition to enter a lot of disparate markets quickly. So there are a mix of on-premise and cloud infrastructure models:  

• On premise self-hosting Kubernetes with Rancher  

• Public cloud provider managed Kubernetes  

• Private cloud solution provided by a third party  

The pros and cons can be listed as follows  

Solution	Pros	Cons
On-premise	Ability to build anywhere	Capital expenditure   Finding the right Datacentre   Timescales until deploy   Cost
Public cloud	Can stand-up new infrastructure quicky   Ability to scale up and down   Managed solution save engineering time	Not available in a lot of markets   Regulation not ready everywhere
Private Cloud	Ability to build anywhere   Ability to scale up and down   Managed solution	Capital expenditure

  

One of the lessons learned by OFTI was that solutions can be combined.   

As an example, OFTI were running three environments in a data centre in Oman. A staging environment, a User Acceptance Testing (UAT) environment and the production environment. When hitting resource constraints, it was possible to migrate parts of the staging environment into the public cloud, freeing up resources in the data centre.   

This flexibility allowed OFTI to rapidly build new functionality, without having to be tied down by hardware procurement pipelines.  

It was made possible by using a microservices stack that is  

• built in GitHub,   

• packaged as Docker containers   

• deployed in Kubernetes using ArgoCD  

• which is running on infrastructure built with Infrastructure as Code (IaC)  

With standardising on modern container-based deployments whether in a data centre or in the public cloud, the adjustments required to move from one to the other were minimal and possible to achieve without needing additional people to perform a migration. Neither was it necessary to redevelop the microservices.  

With strong technical foundations it is possible to look forward to the development of future market with excitement from both an architecture and engineering point of view.  

See figures 1 and 2.