In the context of a fast-paced competitive KYC market, Quicksign needs a platform allowing to quickly adjust to customers' workflows and integration requirements, scale to support the growing usage of our services, secured and resilient by design and fun to build on. Using Camunda, Kubernetes, Kafka and some in-house development, we have built a multi-tenant Kappa micro-services platform that exposes, for each process deployed and without involving any specific development, a dynamically generated business-oriented REST-HATEOAS API. We will explain how we are able to mass produce personalized workflows which will radically change the way financial services onboard their customers.

1. 2018-07-03
Cédric Vidal, Quicksign CTO
@cedricvidal
Building a digital on-boarding
microservices platform using
Camunda BPM and Kafka

2. • Quicksign CTO since January 2014
• Before that 9 years of consulting as tech Lead then
CTO of ProxiAD
• Co-Organized the Eclipse Day Paris in 2010 and 2011
• Designing enterprise architectures since 2004
• Passionate about tech since I got my first Macintosh
SE in 1987
Architect of the new Quicksign platform
Who am I ?
@cedricvidal
@cedricvidal

3. ● QuickSign is the European leader
in digital onboarding for
financial services
● Now handling millions of digital
subscriptions per year
Who are we ?
10 years experience
15 countries
+70% Transactions
growth / year

4. Who is using our platform ?
Consumer finance Wealth management Online banking

5. Why change ?
● Sustained growth ...
● so ...
Too slow to maneuver
Touching the limits of our
in-house “workflow by
configuration” monolithic
engine

6. ● Decrease time to market
● Innovate faster
● Adapt
● Scale
● More agility
The need ?
And also :
● Full auditability
● Multi tenancy
● Secured and resilient
by design
● Cut operational
complexity
● Fun to work with !

7. BPMN
STATISTICS
AI
TRACES
REMOTE
KYC
ELECTRONIC
SIGNATURE
SMART
DOCUMENT
MANAGEMENT
Go BPMN Centric !
& Mic vi !

8. The Kappa/CQRS-ES Architecture
REST APIWrite Interface Read Interface
Com d
Ac i t e
µ-se c
OCR
Fraud
Signature
History stream
His y S I
ap d y i t e l
Qu r e
Ex em f re ce
Streams
KV StorePre-co t J O
re s at
FTS IndexCase µS
Search
µS
s e m
p o s s
As c e l
Blob
Store
Bin c en
Avro

9. Bridging the gap
Current
monolith
Al e y
C S-ES
RE P
Legacy
event log
ConverterStreams
C S Eve s
B N Eve s
Sy h o z
p o s
le y/ne

10. A reactively generated
REST API, crazy ?
• One API per customer
• API “generated” from BPMN
• No compiled code generated !
• Tailored
• Only relevant actions
• Freedom of choice
• Sync or Async
• Push or polling
• Data model aware
• RBAC and partial data visibility
• Multi channels / facets
• ...

11. A reactively generated
REST API, crazy ?
• Relieves Camunda from all
querying workloads
• Insane query speed
• Scale the reads and the writes
separately
• Fully non blocking reads
• Fully asynchronous
• Fully decoupled

12. Everything in Kafka
• Commands
• Single replies
• Multiple replies
• Events (Camunda history only for now)
• Queries (not yet)
al t

13. • In-House built on top of Kubernetes
service metadata and Camel
• Service discovery
• Protocol negociation
• Content negociation
• Exchange pattern negociation
• Semantic versioned routing
=> No activity specific code
deployed in Camunda µS, only
data binding and small logic scripts
Dynamic service routing
Mig g O n So so y
if r i t e t

14. Why Camunda ?
• Very nice web based BPMN and
DMN editors
• Customizable editor !
• Robust BPMN engine
• Enables executable BPMN
• Spring boot ecosystem
• Code easy to integrate/adapt
• Code easy to understand/debug
(except for the core process
virtual machine)
… it simply works !

15. ● Load tests
● Robustness
● Performance
● Robustness (again yes !)
● Production in september (fingers
crossed)
What’s next ?

16. Future improvements
● Study Camunda Optimize
● Add gRPC support
● Migrate to Kubernetes CRDs
● Customized designer with our
activities
● Add GraphQL API
● Migrate to Zeebe

17. Questions ?
Cédric Vidal, Quicksign CTO
@cedricvidal

18. Multiple free photographies from Unsplash.com :
https://unsplash.com/
Credits