Presentation: How To Run on Three Clouds at Once, and When Not To

Ross McFarlane and Kevin Holditch, engineers at Form3, share their experience transitioning from a single-cloud setup to a triple-active multi-cloud architecture. Form3 is a company that powers account-to-account payments, connecting banks and financial institutions to payment schemes in the UK, Europe, and the United States. In 2021, UK banking regulators highlighted the risk of cloud provider concentration and emphasized the need for banks to be able to exit a cloud if it experienced an outage.

This prompted Form3 to develop a multi-cloud strategy. The team aimed to create an active-active-active architecture, treating each cloud provider like an availability zone, ensuring that if any cloud failed, the system would continue operating seamlessly. To achieve this, they adopted cloud-agnostic technologies, moving away from AWS-specific tools and adopting Kubernetes clusters in Google, Azure, and AWS.

They also switched programming languages from Java to Go, enabling the Form3 engineers to build, deploy, and run their payment products consistently across all cloud providers.