How Nubank uses GitHub

By prioritizing collaboration through open source practices, Nubank centers its DevOps on GitHub so they can focus on customers.

Company Overview

Customer Since 2018 Number of Developers 800+ Industry Financial Services Customers Worldwide 12 Million

Brazil-based financial institution Nubank was built on a mission of creating close relationships with customers through excellent service, low fees, and manageable interest rates—along with a cutting-edge digital platform. Founded in 2013, Nubank has grown to serve 12 million customers. As a cloud native company, they rely heavily on technology to deliver on their promise to make banking painless for customers, which is why GitHub Enterprise sits at the heart of their DevOps—from deploying microservices to creating templates to the foundations of their own infrastructure.

The Challenge

Nubank needed a code collaboration platform that wouldn't add additional complexity or infrastructure to their workflows and development stack.

The Solution

By relying on GitHub Enterprise Cloud, Nubank engineers can focus on building new features and adding value to the company's products instead of managing infrastructure.

"Our engineering organization at Nubank relies on GitHub. Everything related to business logic is over there in source code," said Infosec Tech Manager Victor Haberkorn Gomes. "It's really the heart of the company. Everything starts there."

Enabling Collaboration Across Teams

The key to success among Nubank's developers is collaboration, which wouldn't be possible without open source practices through GitHub Enterprise Cloud. Engineers aren't the only ones who use the platform at Nubank—their product and business architecture teams have licenses too, and the total number of GitHub Enterprise licenses in use is growing all the time.

"Using GitHub Enterprise Cloud removes the burden of managing infrastructure, and we don't need to worry about the availability of our versioning code, source code and versioning tools," Gomes said. "It lets us focus on what's important for our business, and that's our customers."

Having teams across the company use the same platform makes it easier for administrative changes and updates to roll out seamlessly across the company on a large scale, instead of each team managing their own tools.

"We like to be structured in a way that lets us move quickly, which is easily done when everyone is on the same platform," Gomes said. "Everybody having access lets us publish any documentation and use that link to broadcast some important information company-wide."

Open Source Contributions and Community

Developers at Nubank both use and contribute to open source repositories like Kubernetes to keep evolving and designing their infrastructure and code pipelines. Open source practices have an extra advantage for Nubank—not only do they help with their own DevOps, but they've actually connected the company with people who end up as employees.

"We get a lot back because we get in touch with the open source community. It's a win-win situation for both sides," Gomes said. "I think our contributions to the development of open source tools helps them evolve in a way that people outside the developer world might not always see."

DevOps Ecosystem Integration

GitHub is built into Nubank's entire DevOps ecosystem, from continuous integration and cloud formation templates to creating a deployment pipeline, as well as integrations with Slack for communication and Quay.io for their image repository. It's increased their overall lead time to production, and they plan to explore GitHub Actions to automate more tasks.

"We like to develop things in a way that helps us to automate operational tasks," Gomes said. "Github actions take away the manual duties that we have for many processes."

Innersourcing and Code Standardization

Nubank's open source practices have paved the way for innersourcing initiatives. Their engineering productivity team has created common code libraries that let developers host repositories for new services, cryptography, log forwarding, and more.

"We try to standardize our code style, our languages, so that everybody can contribute to repositories. It's really good for me making a change on a project, a service skeleton, or a common library to know that everybody's going to use that to deploy their service," Gomes said. "That's the biggest thing that brings value for me, to have all the log trails for every change."

Security and Speed

As an integral part of their DevOps, GitHub helps Nubank secure their code by delegating reviews to different groups instead of running everything through one master branch, as well as deliver code faster while keeping records of different versions. Their engineers work much faster with GitHub, and most already know the platform well when they're hired, which helps with their ambitious onboarding plan.

Looking Forward

More work in open source is planned for the near future. Nubank wants to give back more to the developer community and make more repositories open for contribution, which will also improve their overall reputation in the development community.

"I think the community admires companies that really care about open source. It's a good way to promote Nubank as a company that's really inclusive. We do that in our hiring, but I think we can be inclusive on our code base as well and give back more to the community."

Nubank is excited about moving forward with GitHub. Every time they've needed support, GitHub responds quickly and effectively, and GitHub has even reached out to Nubank to help them find new ways to use their licenses.

"There are things we'll be evolving in the next few months, like creating a community with GitHub to understand why they're developing their environment and ecosystem of tools and features," Gomes said. "The support has been great."