I doubt that Klarna, a bank, have OSI layer 7 proxies in the cloud, with TLS termination in their CDN solution, on AWS. I would assume this traffic is outside of that. But then again, I know they wasted 25M+ Euros on a garbage NodeJS platform. They also created an own cloud once. Yes, it is in the trash bin.
They didn’t “create” their own cloud - they wanted to host their own hardware using an api layer to provision resources. That stuff was not built in-house.
Yeah, I actually took part in setting it up with them. It was CloudStack. API layer in front of hypervisors.
Such is the cloud software... :)
Cloud, besides APIs, i.e managing hardware at scale was not really what they did.
They did roll 1000s of vms per week through it in ci/cd flows though.
As such it did what it was supposed to do - docker/containers was not a thing at that point in time, and I remember thinking it was pretty awesome.
To many nifty engineers, with long fingers, for their own good though. You need to be strict with automations if you want to keep something like that running reliably over time.
There was a Klarna cloud yes. At the time it was unclear if finance/banks could utilise public cloud services (regulatory requirements), so it made sense in that way, but creating your own cloud is something few orgs are capable of.
It is not that uncommon among finance tech companies in Sweden to have some in house cloud. They often already have the knowledge to run servers with virtualization, logging, backups, redundancy and so on. Adding a service layer to that by using Kubernetes for instance is doable.
Klarna Cloud was a deployment of Cloudstack or Openstack (my memory fails me now) for internal usage, when there was still a lot of discussions around cloud lock-in, it was not an in-house built cloud platform.
I did not think they actually wrote the code. But I think the ambition was higher. Pretty much every CTO in this country have hubris and think their services will be sold to third parties.
