One-to-Many Products, One-to-Many Countries: Scaling Nubank to 127 Million Customers

This presentation discusses the evolution of Nubank's architecture over a decade to support its growth from a single product in one country to multiple products across several countries, serving 127 million customers.

Key Topics:

• Growth Challenges: Nubank faced challenges as it expanded in terms of product offerings and geographical presence.
• Architectural Changes: The initial architecture became a constraint and led to significant adaptations to handle increased demand and regulatory complexities.
• Scaling Strategies:
  • Introduction of shards as a core strategy for horizontal scaling and fault isolation.
  • Development of cloud environments for different geographical realms and products.
• Technological Infrastructure:
  • Use of Kubernetes, Kafka, and a microservices architecture standardization.
  • Implementation of Baselines for ensuring maturity and compliance across diverse environments.
• Lessons Learned: The need for flexible, resilient systems and the challenge of change management in a rapidly growing engineering organization.

Conclusion: The presentation highlighted essential methods for treating platform architecture as a strategic concern, addressing problems before they escalate with practical examples. The insights are applicable to other organizations facing similar scaling challenges.

This is the end of the AI-generated content.

Cloud-native tooling and platform engineering promise everything we need to run software at scale: public clouds, infrastructure as code, developer tooling, and well-understood deployment and scaling models that abstract away complexity.

But what happens when business growth outpaces architectural assumptions?

This talk tells the story of how Nubank’s architecture evolved over a decade to support exponential growth, not just in traffic, but in products, regulatory domains and as an engineering organization.

When Nubank expanded from a single product and market into many products and many countries, the generic cloud deployment models and scaling patterns that served us at first became constraining.

We will walk through the challenges that emerged as:

• The number of products grew rapidly, from credit cards to bank accounts, loans, insurance, investments and more.
• Regulatory boundaries multiplied across countries.
• Our horizontal scaling strategy became the bottleneck.

Against this backdrop, we’ll explore some architectural adaptations:

• Internal architectural concepts to better reason about the system and enable flexible cloud deployment aligned with business needs.
• System boundaries to reduce blast radius and increase autonomy.
• Offering platform capabilities as products, hiding complexity from product engineers while providing opinionated “golden paths.”

You’ll leave with practical deployment patterns and concrete examples showing how architectural choices both enabled and constrained business outcomes. Expect to gain insight into treating platform architecture as a first-class strategic concern, not just an operational one, especially in organizations where growth introduces new dimensions of complexity.