Consumers are more active online than ever, and so are cybercriminals. BioCatch has come up with a better way to catch bad guys, which involves analyzing huge volumes of real-time user behavioral data as transactions are underway. However, the company’s success outstripped its virtual machine-based architecture, and it decided to re-architect its solution using microservices, containers, and open source software. Its new Python-based platform takes advantage of containers, Apache Spark, and open source DC/OS running in Microsoft Azure Container Service. With its new architecture, BioCatch has improved performance exponentially, slashed costs dramatically, and can enhance its product daily versus quarterly.
Sela has a track record of over 3 decades in leading the consulting and technology knowledge in Israel. Sela, as an MSP helped BioCatch reaching their business goals on Microsoft Azure.
REDUCE FRAUD WITH PASSIVE, CONTINUOUS AUTHENTICATION
Behavioral biometrics studies how individuals use their mouse, tap their keyboard, and hold and touch their smartphones. BioCatch analyzes more than 500 such parameters to create a unique user profile that cannot be lost, stolen, or imitated.
What’s great about the BioCatch approach is that it protects the integrity of a user session through its duration. It’s totally invisible and doesn’t require secret questions or other interruptions to the user experience.
Behind the scenes, BioCatch is crunching huge amounts of data as it captures and analyzes thousands of events for every user session. An event can be a simple mouse movement, a change in a smartphone angle, or a measure of how much pressure a user applies when tapping an onscreen button.
Multiplied by millions of user sessions each month, BioCatch has a very large big-data application. When the company was founded in 2011, its engineers designed the BioCatch 1.0 analytical platform to handle up to 5 million simultaneous users—which sounded like a really large number at the time. However, when the BioCatch service was a runaway hit and traffic skyrocketed from 2 million to 8 million users in the first year, the company’s underlying architecture struggled to keep up.
“Although we were born in the cloud, with our solution running in Microsoft Azure from day one, we had a traditional, monolithic code base and a virtual machine-based infrastructure,” says Dekel Shavit, Director of Operations and Chief Information Security Officer at BioCatch. “We couldn’t make code changes quickly enough to keep up with customer needs and fraudster moves, and the cost of a VM-based infrastructure was too high. We needed lower costs and better performance on an elastic scale.”
RE-ARCHITECT FOR CONTAINERS AND OPEN SOURCE
A participant in the Microsoft BizSpark Program, which helps entrepreneurs get off the ground, BioCatch availed itself of Microsoft cloud experts for advice. They recommended switching to microservices and containers. “Containers, and specifically Azure Container Service, fit our needs like a glove,” Shavit says. “We were reassured that the technology was able to handle the needs of even our largest financial services customers.”
BioCatch worked together with Sela’s SMEs to select open source DC/OS as its container orchestrator, which builds on Apache Mesos as its cluster manager and the Apache Spark data compute framework. “By using Azure Container Service with open source DC/OS, we are able to use a single scheduler for both Apache Spark workloads and Docker containers, thus simplifying our architecture,” Shavit says.
In fact, BioCatch used open source software to rewrite its entire platform for microservices. “Open source software was most cost-effective and gave us the greatest performance optimization options,” Shavit says. “We migrated all our algorithms from .NET Framework MATLAB to Python, which makes it much easier to do real-time changes.”
The combination of Architects from the Microsoft team together with Sela’s SMEs worked with BioCatch to come up with the best tools for every need. “I was frankly shocked at the amount of open source knowledge that Microsoft had and its openness in recommending technologies that were best for us,” Shavit says. “With Microsoft, we can get the support we need, no matter which tools we’re using. I don’t need to have DC/OS, Redis, and Python experts but instead can call Microsoft and get immediate help with all these tools, because it knows how to run big-data open source applications in the cloud.”
The BioCatch team adopted a gradual approach to implementing BioCatch 2.0. It still runs Azure Virtual Machines and containers side by side until it can rewrite all aspects of its application. Still, with a sprint-oriented DevOps methodology, BioCatch moved from proof of concept to a production product in Azure Container Service in about two and a half months. “We found that the hard part wasn’t the coding but changing our operational processes,” says Shavit. “Instead of upgrading and deploying a monolithic code base once a month, we needed to create continuous innovation/continuous deployment processes and think in terms of smaller feature releases.”feature releases.
BioCatch has always used a DevOps development methodology, but the addition of microservices has enabled its DevOps team to work in near-real time. “Before microservices, our DevOps guys were basically enhanced IT guys,” Shavit says. “They didn’t help push code into production. Today, they are pushing code like any other developer. We’ve empowered every developer to be a tester, scaler, and quality assurance person.”
RE-ARCHITECT FOR CIMPROVE PERFORMANCE WHILE SLASHING COSTS DRAMATICALLYONTAINERS AND OPEN SOURCE
A participant in the Microsoft BizSpark Program, which helps entrepreneurs get off the ground, BioCatch availed itself of Microsoft cloud experts for advice. They recommended switching to microservices and containers. “Containers, and specifically Azure Container Service, fit our needs like a glove,” Shavit says. “We were reassured that the technology was able to handle the needs of eveWith its new architecture, BioCatch has seen average response times improve by more than 1,500 percent. “By re-architecting our platform using microservices and containers, we can scale much faster and more easily,” Shavit says. “Previously, if a customer made a change on its website that resulted in a fivefold increase in traffic, it took us a long time to ramp up our infrastructure to support that load. Today, we can ramp up in about 20 seconds, and it happens automatically.”n our largest financial services customers.”
A participant in the Microsoft BizSpark Program, which helps entrepreneurs get off the ground, BioCatch availed itself of Microsoft cloud experts for advice. They recommended switching to microservices and containers. “Containers, and specifically Azure Container Service, fit our needs like a glove,” Shavit says. “We were reassured that the technology was able to handle the needs of eveWith its new architecture, BioCatch has seen average response times improve by more than 1,500 percent. “By re-architecting our platform using microservices and containers, we can scale much faster and more easily,” Shavit says. “Previously, if a customer made a change on its website that resulted in a fivefold increase in traffic, it took us a long time to ramp up our infrastructure to support that load. Today, we can ramp up in about 20 seconds, and it happens automatically.”n our largest fiThis means that BioCatch can go after customers that it couldn’t approach before, add more behavioral characteristics to its product, support more end users, and, ultimately, better keep up with fraudsters, who never slow down. “We can now grow the business without worrying about technology limits,” Shavit says. “Every month, we process exponentially more data.”nancial services customers.”
Just as important, BioCatch has reduced costs dramatically by moving from virtual machines to a container-based architecture. The company is redirecting that savings into breaking into new markets and becoming even more data-oriented.
INNOVATE FASTER
Another benefit of deploying a microservices architecture is the ability to enhance the product at a faster pace. “Previously, we pushed out a quarterly release. Today, we are pushing out updates up to 15 times a day, for both functionality and performance improvements,” Shavit says. “Faster innovation is critical in our business, because fraudsters are fast. We need to react on a daily basis to address new threats. Also, our customers are always pushing us to do more. We don’t want to tell them, ‘We’ll get that to you next quarter.’”
With microservices in Azure, Bycatch can much more easily stay ahead of the bad guys
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