How Rakuten Card is Driving Innovation with Payara Platform in a Traditionally Conservative Japanese Tech Culture

Arshal Ameen, the application architect atRakuten Card - the number one credit card issuer in Japan- recently spoke at the 2019 Kafka Summit. His talk focused on how Rakuten Card is driving innovation in a traditionally conservative Japanese tech culture and how Payara Enterprise Support is helping out on this journey. He also shares further information about the company’s future plans for its Payara environment.

Hi Arshal, please tell us about Rakuten Card.

Rakuten Card Co. Ltd. of Tokyo provides credit card services. The company conducts credit card issuing, card loans, credit guarantee, and other financial businesses. We are the number one credit card company in customer satisfaction.

What does Rakuten use the Payara Platform for?

We use it as application server for all our customer-facing front end applications. We also use Payara Micro as consumers for streaming platform and Payara Embedded for scheduled batch jobs.

Why is the company investing in Payara Enterprise Support?

Security patches: Since Payara Platform is open source, depending only on the community for security patches that are critical to enterprise applications is a risk. But with Enterprise Support we will be able to handle this more effectively and promptly.

24*7 : We still have some of our critical applications using Payara Platform 4, although migration to Payara Platform 5 has been planned, it will take some time due to other dependencies. With Enterprise Support for Payara Platform 4, we can take a breath and concentrate on higher priority work.

You spoke at the Kafka Summit this year. Your talk focused on how Rakuten Card is driving innovation in a traditionally conservative Japanese tech culture. Can you tell us more details about how Payara Enterprise Support is helping out on this innovation journey?

We are in the process of creating a streaming platform for all event-based processes in a credit card system, some of the use cases include on-boarding process, ledger management, event based customer notifications & CDC. While designing this new platform, we had to make sure that existing subsystems connected to this streaming platform aren’t affected directly. One complexity of this system is that Kafka processes messages at a high speed and ensuring exactly one delivery and at least one delivery on the consumer level is very important. Payara support helped us implement consumers for these existing subsystems using Payara Micro JCA Adapters which provides consumer application with ACID features for Kafka message processing. With Payara’s JCA adapter, we can focus on implementing business and presentation logic and not on low-level logic related to Kafka integration and system-level mechanisms (transactions, connection management, crash recovery, error tracing, and logging).

What’s next for Rakuten Card and its Payara environment?

Cloud-native! Moving from a BareMetal architecture to cloud native architecture is the next step for us.

• Breaking down of monolith application to microservices
• Payara Full server to containerized Payara Micro server
• Job orchestration: Scheduled chain batch jobs to fault-tolerant scheduler for containerized jobs using Payara Embedded.

Thanks for the interview Arshal!

You can find Arshal Ameen on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.