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Open Fabric: Set the tech foundation and built an MVP from scratch

Founded and led by veterans from fintech players like Paypal & Grab, Open Fabric is a BNPL platform, built to enable an open commerce network for customers and credit providers in South East Asia to radically simplify merchant integrations for digital payment methods.

With a team of 8 engineers, Dwarves helped set the tech foundation and together built an MVP from scratch. Within a year, Dwarves helped ship the system to onboard and configure payment methods for companies to the Open Fabric commerce network.

Industry
Fintech

Location
South East Asia

Solution
A Technical Partner to co-manage Open Fabric product development.

A team of senior engineers collaborated with their in-house team to define the tech foundation and develop the MVP from scratch.

Outcome
Dwarves being in charge of the core data master module. With this module completed, the MVP allowing stakeholder (customers, merchants, payment providers) onboarding and transactions was launched on time.

Released the core master data service in the MVP version

Our Service
MVP Development, Tech Consulting, Staff Augmentation

The Challenges

OpenFabric’s key value proposition includes:

These business requirements require the following technical challenges to be solved:

At the same time, we also need to tackle the challenge which most startups encounter during their early stage: having a tech team skilled and experienced enough to align product development with business roadmap.

The Solutions

Rapid Team Scaling Solution

The key to this collaboration is to provide OpenFabric with engineers who are highly skilled in both coding skills and solutions design skills. In a span of 2 weeks, Dwarves managed to deploy 3 engineers meeting the required skills.

The team consists of:

Our 3 engineers worked together with OpenFabric’s engineers as one unified team. With their prior experience working on similar products, it didn’t take long for our engineers to pick up and start performing.

Customer Solutions

Vision of the product

For customers, we are a single interface that exponentially accelerates your merchant footprint across use cases, geographies, and channels. To create a friction-less experience for our customers, we help to ensure the product:

How we handle the product

Areas such as maintenance and production issues are risk assessed, planned, and managed as a joint effort with the engineering teams. We help to ensure a strong collaboration process between both our internal team and Dwarves team for any issues or incidents, and this requirement holds true for any remote team.

Technical Solutions

Solution Design

For Open Fabric’s core business concept, in order to meet requirements for high scalability, horizontal scaling is more preferred over vertical scaling. With that, the system needs to be organized into several services in accordance to domain boundaries.

Multi-tenancy

Serving both payment gateway provides and merchants, OpenFabric’s multi-tenant architecture allows every user to share the same databases and applications securely, making sure transactions between stakeholders are accepted ubiquitously.

Reporting Service

Internal staff and partner teams need ways to monitor their business operations, such as revenue, transactions.

With limited resources and a rushed time to launch, we have to weigh between building our own report system and allowing easy customization or integrating an existing report service. After thorough research and evaluation, we decided to integrate Metabase to our system, as it was able to meet our requirements.

System Design

SystemTech Stacks
Front-endReact, Typescript
InfrastructureAWS, Lambda, Postgres, DynamoDB, EC2, ECS
Back-endTypescript, Kotlin

Architecture

Open Fabric was designed to become a high-performance, low-latency system that follows practices for Domain-driven design. The system separates some corporate services with different databases. At the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) stage, we need to test the market as fast as possible. The team balances efforts on release milestones and application performance. However, setting boundaries for separate services is top priority for maintenance and improvement.

List of main services

Cloud Infrastructure

We deploy our system to Amazon Web Service Cloud and keep them there. The overall Open Fabric cloud infra is as below.

Deployment

Open Fabric runtime is divided into 4 separate environments. This helps members develop the best technical solutions and resolve issues quickly, while only exposing new releases to users. We use Docker to compose our environments. Additionally, we use the Sam CLI (Command line interface) tool to invoke a lambda function in the local environment.

For the deployment process, we apply a few practices to make remote collaboration more effective.

There are 2 releases in the sprint: a production release in the middle of the sprint (from changes in the previous sprint), and a sandbox release at the end of the sprint. QA has a week to test the release in the sandbox environment. The version in Production will always older than the Sandbox.

This allows us to always verify a bug fix/patch in the lower environment before moving it to production, and avoid the situation of reintroducing the bug because we forget to put the fix back into the main branch.

The Outcome

Together with the Dwarves team, we were able to release essential services that became the foundation of the system. This included the master central configuration service and portals (TSP and OSP) that connects the whole payment gateway system.

The partnership significantly impacted our collaboration in a positive way. With help from our Dwarves team, Open Fabric was able to:

The Dwarves contributed more than just engineering quality and a smooth 100% remote collaboration on technical implementation. Without being constrained, they were able to pick up the pace of their work and continue to improve it. The staff augmentation model enabled OpenFabric to scale up their tech capability fast and lower recruiting, training expenses, invest entirely in product development, and retain our present resources.