Continuous Deployment

Case Study: N26

For our third case study, we will look at continuous deployment at N26. Alberto Ramírez Fernández is a principal engineer in the N26 Platform Engineering group, and he has kindly offered to explain how N26 approaches continuous deployments to production. Before he switched to the principal engineer role, he worked within the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) group (within the internal Platform Engineering domain), which maintains the tools that allow every engineer at N26 to build and deliver software.

N26’s Context

Today N26 is one of the fastest-growing digital banks in the world. As a fully licensed German bank built on the latest technology, N26 makes banking faster, easier, and more trustworthy. Founded in 2013, N26 has welcomed more than 8 million customers in 24 markets to date. As of 2024, N26 employs a diverse team of more than 1,500 people from over 80 nations.

Adoption of Continuous Deployment at N26

Continuous deployment was adopted around 2016 as part of the transition from a monolithic architecture to a service-oriented one. On the one hand, the monolithic application kept using a release train where the team had to manually promote changes following two weeks of testing them. On the other hand, new services came with changes in processes and practices, with continuous deployment being one of them. As more services popped up, better tooling and automation were required. Therefore, tooling to enhance automated end-to-end (E2E) testing ...