On Launching a Distributed System Globally
Kat Liu

N26 has a mission: To build the bank the world loves to use. While we’re currently live in countless countries in the EU, we plan on launching in the US later this year, and also have immediate plans for Brazil and beyond. Launching in global markets presents some fascinating legal, business, and especially technical challenges. We want to launch a core global product while also ensuring regional user data is isolated from other regions. How do we store user data in their legal countries, but ensure that it can be fetched from anywhere around the world? How do we ensure certain data are globally unique? How can we do all of this while minimizing the changes in our existing infrastructure? This talk goes over some of the biggest architectural tradeoffs and hardships we faced while deploying a completely new platform of services.