Online payments are a breeze these days. Customers can check out with a click of a button or a tap of a screen, and not even have to touch their credit card. Sellers, meanwhile, have an abundance of options for payment providers that can integrate into their digital storefronts or applications, eliminating the need to build complex payment processing software themselves. But progress has been slower for in-person payments. Point-of-sale systems can be rigid and unable to adapt to the latest in payment technologies, and Aevi, the in-person payment expert, wants to change that.

Aevi launched in 2015 with the mission to build a world where anyone, anywhere can make or take any kind of payment. To that end, Aevi offers a device-agnostic platform for building, integrating, and orchestrating payment services, data analysis, and other relevant systems. "We can't change the payment game on our own," says Engineering DevOps Lead Andreas Borglin. "We need to work together with hardware vendors, developers, and businesses to achieve our vision."

Before Aevi could unite the world's payment systems, the company needed to unite its own developer platforms. Until 2022, teams in different locations were using different tool sets. Developers in the UK used GitHub, while teams in the Czech Republic used BitBucket and Bamboo. Aevi wanted to standardize on a single, secure, cloud-based platform that the whole company could use to share code, collaborate, and automate workflows. The company decided GitHub Enterprise was the best platform to unify its developers and is migrating approximately 600 repositories to GitHub and standardizing its CI/CD workflows around GitHub Actions.

GitHub provides a wonderful overview of your whole workflow in one place. It reduces context switching and toil.

Standardizing on Actions and GitHub Packages helped streamline developer tooling, going from four different tools to one and saving the company around 40% in annual development tooling costs. But, more importantly, it's unlocking developers' potential. "GitHub provides a wonderful overview of your whole workflow in one place," Borglin says. "It reduces context switching and toil." Packages helped simplify artifact management in both Maven and npm by incorporating all associated tasks seamlessly into the company's standard workflows.

Actions, meanwhile, enables Aevi to enforce its rigorous quality and security standards by automatically running tests and CI procedures without getting in developers' ways. When issues arise, developers are able to view and address them in GitHub, where they already do their work, instead of switching to other applications to see why a merge was blocked and what they might need to do about it. Plus, keeping the whole CI/CD pipeline in the same place they store code means there’s always traceability. It’s easy to tell who made what changes and when, leaving teams with less detective work when resolving problems.

To help developers learn Actions and migrate existing CI/CD workflows to the platform, Aevi enlisted the aid of GitHub Expert Services, who provide support and training for the migration. 

There's nothing developers dislike more than having to do tedious and cumbersome tasks all the time. GitHub Actions’ automation makes them happier.

Aevi’s developers also use Actions to automate a variety of tasks beyond CI/CD, such as building test environments. Actions tremendously simplifies building new workflows, reducing build-time from about an hour to just minutes. Then, developers can share custom actions internally, making it easier and faster to create new composite actions out of existing workflows. All of this saves developers time so they can focus on higher-value work instead of juggling different applications or completing the various manual steps required to configure new virtual machines, run tests, or commit code. It also increases job satisfaction. "There's nothing developers dislike more than having to do tedious and cumbersome tasks all the time," Borglin says. "GitHub Actions’ automation makes them happier."

Security is the foundation on which any payment system must rest. GitHub’s ability to meet the company’s security policies was a major factor in Aevi’s decision to standardize on it. For example, the company enforces strict access controls for external collaborators using GitHub Enterprise Managed Users (EMUs), which enables Aevi to manage access controls through Azure Active Directory as if users were on-premises. Here too, GitHub Expert Services provided support and trained teams to administer the GitHub Enterprise Platform.

"EMUs were fundamental for our move to GitHub. We couldn’t have moved to a cloud-based solution without it," Borglin says. "It helps our security team meet our stringent security requirements." Aevi also uses GitHub OpenID Connect (OIDC) to seamlessly connect actions to cloud resources, such as Amazon Web Services, without having to store secrets within the actions themselves.

Dependabot, meanwhile, has become a part of securing code at Aevi. It flags potential vulnerabilities in dependencies automatically and generates pull requests to fix them, with no need for developers or security engineers to manually run scans or search for patches. "Dependabot helps us catch problems very early, long before there's any risk of them being deployed," Borglin says. "And the automated pull requests save us a massive amount of time and remove the toil from remediating those vulnerabilities."

It’s a win-win. Developers are happier because they spend less time on repetitive work and have fewer productivity blockers. Customers are happier because they get better software, more features, and can rest assured that their financial data and transactions are as secure as possible. Now, with developers across all of Aevi's locations working together on the same platform, they're one step closer to bringing everyone from hardware vendors to developers to sellers together to build a seamless, unified payment experience.