kaChing is an online platform that connects investors with outstanding investment managers. We are a technology driven company, which has adopted lean methodologies from the start, and has achieved a 5-minute commit-to-production cycle. Continuous deployment is a way of life and is integral to our engineering culture.
In this talk, we will present our system's architecture and discuss our service oriented platform dubbed kawala (in the process of being open sourced on http://code.google.com/p/kawala). We will describe the mechanics of an automated release from check-in to production: clean build with full regression testing in less than 3 minutes, packaging and deployment by automatically redirecting traffic using ZooKeeper for coordination, health checks and immune system to monitor the release. Finally, we will talk about planned evolutions and the next challenges we face in our infrastructure.