How WEX Automated Its Way to a Digital Transformation

With over 40 years of experience streamlining, mobilizing, and administering transportation fleets, travel industry payments, and even employee benefits, WEX is a truly global commerce platform. Its services help improve business operations for more than 800,000 customers worldwide. With such a large operation to support, WEX knew it was time to modernize their ecosystem.

As VP of Architecture, Christian Oestreich had his work cut out for him from day one. In attempting to understand the portfolio of work as it related to WEX’s code assets and developer processes, he didn’t have a great way to quantify the quality of the ecosystem, prompting him to look for a turn-key solution that could also handle enterprise customizations.

Challenge

Taking bigger leaps to modernize the ecosystem

“Lots of organizations want to have a digital transformation, move to the cloud, and adopt microservices,” Christian explains, “but when you’re a large enterprise with monolithic and legacy assets, you can’t just jump the shark right to a modernized workflow.” After years of focusing on delivering features, WEX had accrued tech debt, lost automation opportunities, and had a lack of consistency across their processes. 

As his first initiative, Christian was tasked to produce a capability catalog so WEX could understand its ecosystem at a high level. “I remember thinking, OK, we clearly need an internal developer portal (IDP) and software catalog, but not just that—, something that, when we launch new features, can identify what’s in the code, quality control it, and be able to automate as much of the process as possible.”

In doing so, WEX could also eliminate its intensive ticketing process for basic tasks that caused strain, time delays, and unnecessary manual intervention. “If I need to stand up a new EKS cluster, but that takes six weeks for the SRE to do, and they follow their own unique process that’s different from the person sitting next to them, there’s no consistency. The whole thing should just be automated on both sides.”

Solution

Automate the pain away

In searching for WEX’s solution, Christian focused on three priorities: high quality, automation opportunities, and enterprise-readiness/security. Having built a solution from scratch at his prior role, Christian knew that wasn’t for WEX — he wanted something more turnkey. “We looked at an open-source mechanism for Kubernetes, but didn’t see how it would fit with a SaaS developer portal, plus there wasn’t a secure way to run automations on our infra from somebody else’s cloud.” He landed on a buy and build strategy with OpsLevel.

“I liked OpsLevel because of its ability to create automated workflows, and the features like actions and campaigns to actually drive the standardization of these automations and create templates,” Christian says. “A lot of services lean into cataloging, but very few combine that with automations and self-serve as a SaaS product.”

After importing all assets with the GitHub integration, WEX ran a general cataloging of assets, including capabilities to internalize the OpsLevel way of doing it using an “inception” method (as Christian calls it) by building a series of OpsLevel checks to fill in the parameters around tagging, tiering, domain and system scopes to build metadata around the catalog. WEX even has an OpsLevel action to build OpsLevel actions. 

Use cases

Driving automation and service quality with actions

Shortly after signing with OpsLevel, the actions feature was launched, and WEX wasted no time creating the Git-Ops workflow to codify integrations with OpsLevel so the source of truth for all rules, campaigns, and workflows were in code. “We have a two-phase approach,” Christian explains. “First we build a GitHub action that ties into whatever we’re trying to do, like calling an API, running code, running shell scripts — whatever it is, GitHub makes the workflow first. Then developers can boilerplate the GitHub action workflow and OpsLevel workflow by running a self-service action, where one repository runs the action, and another dispatches the workflow.”

With this workflow, WEX has been able to automate repetitive tasks, how they do infrastructure builds, and creating SLAs and service checklists. They’ve even started using AI to help them generate page read-mes to standardize each service.

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