About the customer
Our client’s platform connects agri-businesses and financial institutions so that they can manage their financial activity all in one place. Their platform provides a transparent, streamlined way to implement fintech in the agriculture industry.
GOAL: From POC to PRODUCTION GRADE
When our client and our IAMOPS DevOps Team began working together, their main goal was to move from a Proof-of-Concept infrastructure to a PRODUCTION GRADE infrastructure. This meant their infrastructure needed to be optimized, high-performing, secure, cost-effective, and automated.
Are you ready to scale?
Avoid critical infrastructure mistakes by implementing the best practices.
DevOps teams for Production grade infrastructure
Our roadmap to a Production grade DevOps environment includes three steps:
1. Design: Cloud infrastructure and automation procedures
2. Set-up: Development and QA
3. Migration & Automation: Moving to Production
2. Set-up: Development and QA
3. Migration & Automation: Moving to Production
Step 1: Designing the infrastructure
Assessing the requirements
Security : Security is essential for Fintech since they handle highly confidential financial data.
Performance : They make financial services easier for Agri-businesses and financial institutions. For this reason, accessibility and performance are critical – they cannot risk downtime for their clients since it would directly impact revenue.
Automation : Each client requires a standalone infrastructure due to regulation and security. Thus, they needed an automated process to set up environments.
Mapping the deficiencies
Costly infrastructure : The architecture included an EC2 instance for every container, resulting in too many virtual machines. This infrastructure design was inefficient and expensive.
Manual Infrastructure Management : The initial infrastructure lacked automation and autoscaling, which is incredibly critical for their product.
Designing the Production grade infrastructure
Our primary goal was to design an infrastructure with DevOps best practices, streamlined CI/CD, and AWS 5 pillars of excellence. This involved developing an infrastructure that contained:
Step 2: Developing the cloud infrastructure
Performance: We used ECS Fargate (Elastic Container Service). This way, they no longer needed the clusters of virtual machines for their containers and did not need so many servers. We replaced the classic load balancers with application load balancers to better handle the load.
Security: We moved their entire infrastructure to a private zone, with a custom-VPC allowing us to keep our subnets confidential. The newly implemented VPN directly allows secured access to the private server. We implemented SSO with 2FA for secure access to the AWS account. We created a log for all connections to the infrastructure and AWS console.
Databases: We migrated from MongoDB on EC2 to MongoDB Atlas cluster to improve security and performance. The app and the database were connected through VPC Peering, allowing us to connect AWS and MongoDB Atlassian internally.
Cost Management: We started a weekly procedure for cost monitoring. We created an automation that reviews the actual spending and alerts in case it exceeds the daily budget.
Step 3: Automation Development
CI/CD: For CI/CD, we implemented a Blue/Green (0 Downtime Model). This way, out of two production environments, one is constantly running while the other is idle. As a result, deployment can quickly move from one to the other. This saves all the downtime dedicated to app deployment. We also added a code pipeline for increased availability, which will trigger any changes to ECS Fargate.
IaaC –Infrastructure as Code: Since the company required a new environment for every customer, we needed to create an automation that took out the manual work. We used Terraform to make the user flow – and automation to create all components, i.e., ALB, ECS Fargate, Code pipeline, Route53, and DNS Entries, to create a new environment easily for every new customer.
POC to Production Grade in just 3 Months!
We keep the ongoing Production Grade environment with Infrastructure based on :
- AWS 5 Pillars of excellence
- Continuous monitoring
- Complete documentation management through Confluence
Conclusion
Thank you for reading our case study. The partnership between IAMOPS and the FinTech Startup has enabled innovation and to boost their go to market speed – enabling it to handle their customers in Agribusinesses and Financial institutions. Using our proven approach, our DevOps helped them move from POC to Production Grade.