Use case
Enhanced CI/CD for Data Migrations and Deployments in Core Back-end
- Chirag Sharma
About the Customer
Finariq is a tech company empowering financial institutions to serve merchants at scale by ensuring compliance with card schemes, preventing fraud, and reducing operational costs.
Through its workflow-driven architecture, Finariq simplifies onboarding, underwriting, and risk management for merchants, sellers, transactions, and products.
With a strong open-source foundation, the platform allows businesses to customize their integrations while achieving high flexibility and efficiency. Backed by top-tier investors like Y Combinator and Team8 Capital, Finariq remains at the forefront of innovative solutions for payment risk management.
Customer Challenge
Finariq faced significant challenges with deploying its core backend application, the Workflow Service (Wf-service), which handles critical processes like KYB and KYC workflows. Key issues included:
- Complex CI/CD Processes: Managing data migrations alongside application deployments was cumbersome and error-prone. The lack of automation introduced delays and increased risk during deployments.
- Rebuild Inefficiencies: Redundant builds of the same source code during different deployment stages led to increased resource consumption and extended deployment times.
- Data migrations: The back-end needed to perform data migration on the database both before and after the new application source code is deployed and application is available.
- Release Migrations: New featured migrations need to be run on the choice of any live environments without re-building the current source code in an image. The process needs to be faster than usual deployments as the only source code changing was regarding the migrations.
- Manual Processes: Developers and DevOps teams needed to perform repetitive tasks manually, such as triggering data migrations and syncing the application state post-deployment.
- Lack of Notifications: There was no streamlined way to notify stakeholders about deployment progress or failures, causing inefficiencies and communication gaps.
These challenges affected productivity, increased operational overhead, and heightened the risk of disruptions in production environments.
Solution
IAMOPS implemented an enhanced CI/CD workflow leveraging ArgoCD, Helm hooks, and GitHub Actions to automate deployment and data migration processes for Finariq ’s Wf-service application.
Key features of the solution included:
1) CI/CD Pipeline with Build Once, Deploy Everywhere:
- Designed a multi-staged CI/CD pipeline where the base application image was built once and reused across multiple environments (Dev, Staging, and Prod), reducing build times by up to 66%.
- Integrated GitHub Actions to trigger workflows automatically for specific branches or environments.
2) Automated Data Migrations:
- Enabled migrations as standalone Helm jobs within the application Helm chart.
- Used Helm hooks to schedule pre- and post-deployment migrations, ensuring seamless compatibility between new application versions and database schemas.
- Added manual toggles to enable or disable specific migration jobs to avoid disruptions.
3) ArgoCD Application Sync:
- Integrated ArgoCD to automatically sync the application state with the deployment pipeline, enabling precise control over deployments and migration jobs.
- Provided manual sync options to ensure flexibility in managing deployment workflows.
4) Notification and Monitoring:
- Integrated Slack notifications within GitHub Actions to keep stakeholders informed of deployment and migration statuses.
Here’s an Infrastructure Diagram explaining the solution:
Results & Benefits
The enhanced CI/CD methodology transformed Finariq ’s deployment and migration processes, delivering the following results:
Streamlined Deployments: Developers and DevOps teams no longer needed to perform manual interventions during deployments, significantly reducing downtime.
Improved Efficiency: The “Build Once, Deploy Everywhere” strategy cut build times by 66%, accelerating release cycles.
Enhanced Reliability: By automating data migrations with Helm hooks and ensuring pre-tested compatibility with application updates, the risk of deployment errors was minimized.
Actionable Notifications: Real-time Slack notifications provided visibility into the deployment process, enhancing collaboration and responsiveness.
Future-Proof Architecture: With the flexibility to handle standalone migrations and application syncs, the CI/CD system is prepared for future scaling and evolving requirements.
About IAMOPS
IAMOPS is a full DevOps suite company that supports technology companies to achieve intense production readiness.
Our mission is to ensure that our clients’ infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines are scalable, mitigate failure points, optimize performance, ensure uptime, and minimize costs.
Our DevOps suite includes DevOps Core, NOC 24/7, FinOps, QA Automation, and DevSecOps to accelerate overall exponential growth.
As an AWS Advanced Tier Partner and Reseller, we focus on two key pillars: Professionalism by adhering to best practices and utilizing advanced technologies, Customer Experience with responsiveness, availability, clear project management, and transparency to provide an exceptional experience for our clients.
