ChargeAfter: Expanding globally with a scalable and reliable multi-regional architecture
About ChargeAfter
ChargeAfter is pioneering the embedded lending network for point-of-sale consumer financing for merchants and financial institutions. Powered by a network of lenders and a data-driven matching engine, ChargeAfter streamlines the distribution of credit into a single, secure, and reliable embedded lending platform. Merchants can rapidly implement ChargeAfter’s omnichannel platform online, in-store, and at every point of sale, enabling them to provide personalized financing choices to their customers.
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Contact usChargeAfter implements deployments with Anthos, increasing availability to attract enterprise-level customers, and supporting compliance to enter global markets.
Google Cloud results
- ChargeAfter deploys new features with almost 0% performance issues
- Time to add a new cluster is reduced from one month to two hours
- ChargeAfter is able to focus on scaling and global expansion
ChargeAfter achieves 99.999% availability with Anthos
When shoppers need help with the high price of goods, point-of-sale financing offers a convenient way to access different types of lending products that can help them to maximize spending power and manage their daily expenses. ChargeAfter's multi-lender point-of-sale platform, created using Google Cloud solutions, enables merchants to provide their customers with fast and seamless access to a choice of personalized financing options.
"A customer that doesn't get access to the financing they need at the point of sale means a lost sale for the merchants," explains Varda Bachrach, PR and Content Director, ChargeAfter. "And it's a poor experience for the customer. With ChargeAfter, merchants can offer personalized financing plans from multiple lenders to meet the needs of customers across the credit spectrum."
Anthos enables ChargeAfter to enter a new world of opportunity
Founded in 2017, ChargeAfter's early growth was supported by the Google for Startups program. As the company grew and began to attract enterprise-level customers, with more demanding contractual requirements, ChargeAfter realized it would need enterprise-grade infrastructure to meet those demands.
"The new, bigger customers require a much higher level of availability," explains Konstantin Triger, VP of Technology and Chief Architect, ChargeAfter. "We also need to be multi-regional as we scale, so in case one Google Cloud Region fails, we can continue to provide the service. Building those deployments ourselves was not an option, so we needed an infrastructure that could solve this problem for us."
"To be a serious player in fintech, we needed these capabilities. With Anthos, we can meet our contractual requirements and provide our enterprise customers with high availability, and meet the regulatory compliance to approach banks and merchants around the globe. Anthos allows us to enter a new world of opportunities."
—Konstantin Triger, VP ofTechnology and Chief Architect, ChargeAfterTo meet the need for greater availability, as well as to scale out and expand the service across multiple regions, ChargeAfter turned to Google Kubernetes Engine and Anthos, Google Cloud's leading, enterprise-grade, secure, container runtime platforms, fully managed by Google.
After three months, and with support from the Google Cloud team, ChargeAfter had implemented the new infrastructure, giving the company the required 99.999% availability it needed to serve its new enterprise clients.
"To be a serious player in fintech, we needed these capabilities," explains Triger. "With Anthos, we can meet our contractual requirements and provide our enterprise customers with high availability, and meet the regulatory compliance to approach banks and merchants around the globe. Anthos allows us to enter a new world of opportunities."
Blue-Green deployments allow new features to be rolled out smoothly
Part of the improved service ChargeAfter can now offer its growing customer base is a smoother roll-out of new features. As a SaaS company, ChargeAfter is constantly evolving and adding new features. Previously, new features were made available to all customers at once, which meant that if there was an issue, it would impact everyone.
Now, with Service Mesh, ChargeAfter can use blue-green deployments to implement new features, with a new version of the feature rolled out to a very small percentage of customers, while everyone else continues to use the old version. If there is an issue with the new feature, it will only affect a very small subset of customers. Once the issue is fixed, the new version can be made available to all customers, while the old version is then used as the basis for new developments. This means that we can test new features and understand how our customers react to them, so our customers enjoy a much smoother experience overall and remain unaffected by any possible issues in the new deployment process.
A more stable experience for enterprise customers
Many enterprise-level merchants enjoy the stability of ChargeAfter's service and wouldn't necessarily benefit from features that have been developed with other customers in mind. With Anthos, ChargeAfter is able to create dedicated environments for these customers that mean they can continue to use the service they are used to, without the new features they don't need.
"Having an ability to have several logical environments in production, some of them just for specific bigger enterprise customers, is a key factor to provide stability for those customers,” explains Triger. "Because from their perspective, stability is much more important than features."
ChargeAfter saves resources with a fully managed service
ChargeAfter has also been able to save significant development time in deploying new environments and clusters to its architecture. Previously, adding a new environment would have taken about two weeks of manual implementation. With Anthos, a simple script sees a new environment automatically deployed within 10 minutes. The time spent adding a new cluster, meanwhile, is down from a month of manual configurations to just two hours, almost all of which is automated. With the time ChargeAfter's development team saves, they are now able to focus on developing the core business.
"That time reduction is huge, it's not even on the same scale," Triger explains. "And it means we can put our effort into developing new features, allowing us to reach more customers and serve them more effectively."
Enjoying the view through a single pane of glass
With all these services running in different clusters, across multiple regions, ChargeAfter has to do far more monitoring than it used to, to ensure its service is running effectively. While this would previously have been an arduous manual process, ChargeAfter can now use Service Mesh to achieve an integrated overview of its entire infrastructure.
"Anthos provides excellent monitoring and observability tools that allow me to view everything through a single pane of glass, so that I can see what the current status is, and fix any problems easily."
—Konstantin Triger, VP of Technology and Chief Architect, ChargeAfter"What I need with a multi-cluster infrastructure is to see the whole picture," explains Triger. "I don't want to switch pages between 20 clusters to see what is working and what is not, and work out where the problem is. It's not practical. Anthos provides excellent monitoring and observability tools that allow me to view everything through a single pane of glass, so that I can see what the current status is, and fix any problems easily."
"Google Cloud enables us to operate across multiple regions, and cover the complete workflow from deployment to monitoring, providing a better service for customers. I don't expect magic, but I do expect a partner that can scale as we grow. With Google Cloud, that is just what we get."
—Konstantin Triger, VP of Technology and Chief Architect, ChargeAfterWith Anthos now fully implemented, ChargeAfter experiences the greater reliability required by its enterprise-level clients. Which means ChargeAfter can look forward to a new chapter of growth and global expansion, as it helps more merchants to complete sales, and more customers to find the point-of-sale financing option that is right for them.
"Google Cloud enables us to operate across multiple regions, and cover the complete workflow from deployment to monitoring, providing a better service for customers," says Triger. "I don’t expect magic, but I do expect a partner that can scale as we grow. With Google Cloud, that is just what we get."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About ChargeAfter
ChargeAfter is pioneering the embedded lending network for point-of-sale consumer financing for merchants and financial institutions. Powered by a network of lenders and a data-driven matching engine, ChargeAfter streamlines the distribution of credit into a single, secure, and reliable embedded lending platform. Merchants can rapidly implement ChargeAfter’s omnichannel platform online, in-store, and at every point of sale, enabling them to provide personalized financing choices to their customers.