Paying it forward, 5x faster

Servicing 1.6 million customers requires sophisticated infrastructure

Brazil has one of the fastest developing economies on the planet. Beyond its vast stores of natural resources and raw materials, it’s also home to a burgeoning professional services industry driven by digital-savvy entrepreneurs and business leaders.

Like other markets, Brazilian businesses large and small are increasingly using credit and debit cards in their daily operations and are turning to Cielo for the tools and technologies to support a surging interest in card-driven transactions. The company, founded in 1995, is the leading electronic payment processor in Brazil and Latin America, processing more than 26 million transactions daily, a financial volume equivalent to 10% of the country’s GDP.

But processing huge volumes of transactions each day requires a sophisticated and adaptable infrastructure to support low-latency transactions across a myriad of terminals, systems, and vendors. And company leaders feared that the team’s traditional manual infrastructure management could slow the development and delivery of new solutions to the market that would slowly erode Cielo’s position as a market leader.

“Competition in payment processing in Brazil is intense and only getting more challenging,” says Antonio Lombardi Neto, infrastructure and telecom director at Cielo. "We needed to accelerate delivery of new solutions, features, and functionality to our customers if we wanted to maintain our market advantage. But to do that we needed a way to provision infrastructure faster, more efficiently, and in a cost-effective way.”

Dynamic market, chaotic infrastructure

In the electronic payments industry scale, speed, and high availability are everything. Not only do customers and internal users expect their preferred applications and systems to be reliably accessible, but both industry and government regulators also set lofty standards for performance, security, and availability financial services firms like Cielo must meet.

In the past Cielo had provisioned most of its infrastructure — both on-premises bare metal boxes and occasional cloud deployments in AWS and Azure — manually. However, they realized the process was misaligned with the team’s agile development methodology and simultaneously slowed new product development while increasing operating costs.

In particular, the lack of a standardized deployment methodology made it difficult to solve distributed infrastructure problems. Every project required the infrastructure team to create new environments, which could take up to a month to set up and cause significant delays in releasing new market-shaping products like a digital wallet, mobile payment solutions, and other business enablement solutions.

“We had two goals for modernizing our infrastructure deployments. One was to support our agile product development model so we can deliver innovative and reliable solutions to our customers faster,” Neto explains. “The other was to empower our development squads with some basic guardrails and guidelines provided by policy-as-code features that would help them work more creatively, faster. But to achieve both, we needed to standardize and simplify the entire end-to-end development process to continue providing our customers with scalable, high-performance solutions.”

Cielo is using HashiCorp Terraform for efficient infrastructure delivery to support aggressive product development timelines.