6 ms·

> I just want to say that I think there is a huge amount of FUD about how you can and cannot build your technology as a regulated entity – and in particular as

> I just want to say that I think there is a huge amount of FUD about how you can and cannot build your technology as a regulated entity – and in particular as a bank. In reality, close to 100% of requirements from a regulator will tell you _what_ you must build, not _how_ you must build it. Even then, especially in terms of resilience and security, they are almost always a subset of our own requirements. Having worked with banks and insurers solely in Java and connecting to legacy (mostly Cobol) before, I was surprised, in my current position, to see some companies doing their complete banking back end in PHP & MySQL. I knew the how is not part of the regulations, but I did expect the CTOs to pick the 'no one ever got fired for choosing' choice.

webscaleizfun 10y ago
It seems common knowledge these days among the slightly but not too technically inclined that any new major project should use a LAMP stack as its base. People see Facebook, Amazon, and many others running PHP & MySQL on Linux at scale and they know it works reliably, so while it may not have the support of Cisco or Oracle, it is pretty close on the 'no one ever got fired for choosing' X scale, since you can point to every other major company using these building blocks reliably if your investors, CEO, board or auditors asked why you chose to use PHP & MySQL. In summary, PHP & MySQL have become the modern equivalent of a "safe" choice for your stack to be built on. Its not necessarily a bad choice either, you get access to a large community of skilled people who can write PHP & write SQL statements, and while everyone likes to hate on PHP, it isn't about to up and disappear any time in the next decade either (unlike COBOL).
- lgieron 10y ago
  I'd say the reliability the bank is looking for is much higher than what's acceptable for web companies (i.e. web companies are fine with eventual consistency, which would is obviously unacceptable in a banking system outside of trivial non-core features).
  - UK-AL 10y ago
    I would assume its pretty hard to make something ACID style when doing stuff across Microservices, which i'm assuming mondo is doing.
    - KirinDave 10y ago
      That part is surprisingly easy if you architect it right. The core abstraction most banks use is your "available balance" and the fact that they can reconcile on a longer time period than seconds.
  - jerf 10y ago
    I'd also suggest that it's not just scale; the kind of reliability Facebook needs is fundamentally different than what a bank needs. Broadly speaking, Facebook needs the site to keep working as well as possible even if some subservice fails, and a bank needs a subservice not to fail. I'm summarizing here and I know it; clearly neither of them is actually on the absolute extreme end, as Facebook needs authentication to work and a bank may not care if the interest rate display widget on their customer banking app fails to load a couple of times. But I'd still suggest there's enough difference between the requirements to be a fundamentally different domain. Even in "the cloud" things differ between services. A social media app has very different reliability requirements than a backup cloud.
    - hueving 10y ago
      Well actually there are many sub services in a bank that can go down without major impacts. The two major banks I use have weekly planned outages of features like old statement retrieval, person to person payments, ACH transfers, etc. Basically everything in the web interface could experience outages without any major crisis. As long as ATM requests always work, nobody really seems to care.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      "Broadly speaking, Facebook needs the site to keep working as well as possible even if some subservice fails, and a bank needs a subservice not to fail." One of the reasons many of them stick with mainframes, AS/400's, and NonStop systems for backends. ;)
- SEJeff 10y ago
  Oracle will happily support MySQL. In fact, they own it.
tormeh 10y ago
PHP in banking? That's scary. Pretending to be Facebook and being able to handle PHP development looks like a bad judgment call from where I'm standing. PHP seems like it is made for everything banks are not. I have the impression PHP is hard to do securely, invites bugs but let you get going quickly. This sounds like Lockheed deciding to use C++ for the F35.
- obeattie 10y ago
  To be clear, we (Monzo) are not writing banking software in PHP, or using MySQL.
KirinDave 10y ago
> , I was surprised, in my current position, to see some companies doing their complete banking back end in PHP & MySQL. Glad to know! Now I need to find these folks so I can hide in a dumpster from them!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

webscaleizfun 10y ago

It seems common knowledge these days among the slightly but not too technically inclined that any new major project should use a LAMP stack as its base. People see Facebook, Amazon, and many others running PHP & MySQL on Linux at scale and they know it works reliably, so while it may not have the support of Cisco or Oracle, it is pretty close on the 'no one ever got fired for choosing' X scale, since you can point to every other major company using these building blocks reliably if your investors, CEO, board or auditors asked why you chose to use PHP & MySQL. In summary, PHP & MySQL have become the modern equivalent of a "safe" choice for your stack to be built on. Its not necessarily a bad choice either, you get access to a large community of skilled people who can write PHP & write SQL statements, and while everyone likes to hate on PHP, it isn't about to up and disappear any time in the next decade either (unlike COBOL).

lgieron 10y ago
I'd say the reliability the bank is looking for is much higher than what's acceptable for web companies (i.e. web companies are fine with eventual consistency, which would is obviously unacceptable in a banking system outside of trivial non-core features).
- UK-AL 10y ago
  I would assume its pretty hard to make something ACID style when doing stuff across Microservices, which i'm assuming mondo is doing.
  - KirinDave 10y ago
    That part is surprisingly easy if you architect it right. The core abstraction most banks use is your "available balance" and the fact that they can reconcile on a longer time period than seconds.
- jerf 10y ago
  I'd also suggest that it's not just scale; the kind of reliability Facebook needs is fundamentally different than what a bank needs. Broadly speaking, Facebook needs the site to keep working as well as possible even if some subservice fails, and a bank needs a subservice not to fail. I'm summarizing here and I know it; clearly neither of them is actually on the absolute extreme end, as Facebook needs authentication to work and a bank may not care if the interest rate display widget on their customer banking app fails to load a couple of times. But I'd still suggest there's enough difference between the requirements to be a fundamentally different domain. Even in "the cloud" things differ between services. A social media app has very different reliability requirements than a backup cloud.
  - hueving 10y ago
    Well actually there are many sub services in a bank that can go down without major impacts. The two major banks I use have weekly planned outages of features like old statement retrieval, person to person payments, ACH transfers, etc. Basically everything in the web interface could experience outages without any major crisis. As long as ATM requests always work, nobody really seems to care.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    "Broadly speaking, Facebook needs the site to keep working as well as possible even if some subservice fails, and a bank needs a subservice not to fail." One of the reasons many of them stick with mainframes, AS/400's, and NonStop systems for backends. ;)
SEJeff 10y ago
Oracle will happily support MySQL. In fact, they own it.

tormeh 10y ago

PHP in banking? That's scary. Pretending to be Facebook and being able to handle PHP development looks like a bad judgment call from where I'm standing. PHP seems like it is made for everything banks are not. I have the impression PHP is hard to do securely, invites bugs but let you get going quickly. This sounds like Lockheed deciding to use C++ for the F35.

obeattie 10y ago
To be clear, we (Monzo) are not writing banking software in PHP, or using MySQL.

KirinDave 10y ago

> , I was surprised, in my current position, to see some companies doing their complete banking back end in PHP & MySQL. Glad to know! Now I need to find these folks so I can hide in a dumpster from them!

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]