Klarna is a Sweden-based company, offering zero-friction and safe online payment solutions. At the core of Klarna’s services is the concept of after delivery payments, which lets buyers receive ordered good before any payment is due. At the same time, Klarna assumes the credit-and fraud risk for merchants. Klarna is one of Europe’s fastest growing companies, reaching more than 800 employees, 15 million end-users, and 70 million transactions in just eight years. To power its diverse range of services, Klarna employees a multi-tiered hybrid infrastructure centered on a large virtualized server installation complemented by physical and cloud resources.
"We're updating or introducing new applications almost daily to keep pace with demand," said Pär Isaksson, CIO, Klarna. "It would be impossible to manually build, test, and deploy these applications across an infrastructure as heterogeneous as ours. Enterprise Chef empowers our engineering teams to spin up test environments, stage, and deploy applications at will, so we can move at the speed of demand."
Klarna deployed Enterprise Chef to automate user access, resource configuration, and application deployment within its XenServer-based virtualized infrastructure. Using Enterprise Chef, Klarna has automated application building, testing and delivery for a broad range of engineering teams that use its virtualized servers, enabling these teams to easily replicate any of Klarna's production environments, run a diverse set of automated tests, then deploy the applications into production. Because Enterprise Chef is multi-tenant Klarna's engineers can automate multiple servers, environments, and even applications with a single Chef instance, meaning the test and deployment process accelerates, while using less system resources.
Pär Isaksson added: "Our ultimate goal is for any engineer to spin up any part of our system at any time and be empowered to make changes, test them, and deploy them using Chef code."
"Klarna's vision for a truly empowered development team is a winning approach as technology becomes the primary means for delivering good and services. And as an online payments provider, Klarna understands this shift better than most," said Adam Jacob, Chief Dev Officer, Opscode. "Now they have a competitive advantage in our digital economy with Chef delivering an automated service-oriented architecture for super-fast development cycles."