Armakuni’s story kicked off in 2012 when we built a payments platform for Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day. The platform handled up to 500 transactions per second, processing £100 million in just six hours. To give you an idea, at the time, the entire UK card network was processing around 300 transactions per second—so we were dealing with some serious volume.

Our platform was designed to go from commit to production in 15 minutes, without a hitch. It was highly automated, able to deploy across multiple cloud providers, payment systems, and regions. Even if we lost a major provider like AWS, the platform kept running. On the morning of the event, we could set up the whole thing across three continents in about two hours.

We were early movers in the cloud-native and DevOps space, and our work caught the attention of AWS and Gartner, who wrote a paper about it in 2012. During an AWS conference, our CEO, Tim, shared how we made this happen. The CTO of Santander asked him, “We’re a bank with thousands of engineers—why can’t we do that?” That question led to us helping Santander’s engineering teams adopt fast, reliable cloud-native delivery.

And that’s where the AK Way was born. We went from just building solutions to transforming how companies work, a journey we’ve been on since early 2016.