Fingo Ecobank
About the Customer:
Fingo Ecobank, an African-based neobank, is dedicated to providing financial services to underserved communities. Their vision of enabling financial inclusivity required a scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure. Initially hosted on Heroku, Fingo Ecobank faced challenges in meeting the demands of its growing user base. Limitations in scalability, deployment speed, and compliance with industry standards hindered their ability to deliver high-quality services effectively.
To address these challenges, Hybytes, an AWS Partner, designed and implemented a cloud-native architecture on AWS, embracing modern DevOps practices to enhance scalability, performance, and operational efficiency.
Customer Challenge:
Before engaging with Hybytes, Fingo Ecobank’s operations were constrained by:
- Scalability and Reliability Issues:
- Heroku’s platform limitations hindered Fingo Ecobank’s ability to scale applications dynamically and manage increasing traffic demands.
- Manual Infrastructure and Deployment Processes:
- Infrastructure provisioning and code deployments were manual and error-prone, leading to show release cycles and inconsistencies across environments.
- Limited Monitoring and Observability:
- Monitoring tools provided fragmented insights, making it difficult to identify bottlenecks and optimize application performance.
- Security and Compliance Concerns:
- As a financial company, Fingo Ecobank required stringent security measures and compliance capabilities that Heroku struggled to meet.
- Long-Term Support:
- Fingo Ecobank required a reliable solution that ensured 24/7 monitoring, prompt service request handling, and cost optimization. Their existing setup lacked continuous oversight, leading to delayed issue resolution and unnecessary operational expenses. A robust support system was essential to maintain high availability, streamline resource utilization, and optimize cloud costs effectively.
Fingo Ecobank sought a modern, automated, secure solution to overcome these limitations and drive business transformation.
Partner Solution:
Hybytes implemented a comprehensive DevOps transformation for Fingo Ecobank, leveraging AWS services to build a scalable, automated, and secure architecture.
- Transitioning from Heroku to AWS with Automated Infrastructure Management:
Adopting Infrastructure as Code (IaC):
- Migrated Fingo Ecobank’s infrastructure to AWS, managing it using Terraform for automated and consistent provisioning of resources across all environments (Development, QA, Staging, Production).
- Designed and deployed a secure multi-environment VPC setup with public and private subnets, ensuring enhanced security and scalability.
- Automated the creation of key AWS resources, including Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) clusters, RDS (Aurora PostgreSQL), ElastiCache (Redis), and S3.
- Hosting Applications in Amazon EKS with Fargate:
- Fingo Ecobank Ecobank’s microservices were containerized and deployed on Amazon EKS with Fargate.
- Frontend Services: Hosted on EKS for efficient orchestration and scalability.
- Backend Services: Deployed across environments using consistent Kubernetes deployment manifests.
- EKS ensured automatic scaling, fault tolerance, and seamless integration with AWS services.
- Automating Development and Deployment Processes:
- Implemented CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions to:
- Build Docker images for all microservices.
- Push images to Amazon ECR (Elastic Container Registry).
- Deploy containers to EKS across all environments automatically.
- This enabled Fingo Ecobank to achieve rapid, reliable, and error-free deployments, reducing deployment times from hours to minutes.
- Enhancing Monitoring and Observability:
- Configured AWS CloudWatch for centralized monitoring of application logs and resource metrics, providing real-time visibility into performance.
- Enabled AWS CloudTrail to log API activities and track changes for auditing and compliance.
- Integrated Datadog for advanced observability:
- Forwarded logs and metrics from CloudWatch to Datadog using a Lambda function.
- Created detailed dashboards and set up alerts to monitor application performance and detect anomalies.
- Used Datadog’s Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to trace and optimize application behavior.
- Improving Scalability and Performance:
- Utilized Amazon ElastiCache (Redis) for caching, reducing latency and database load.
- Migrated Fingo Ecobank’s database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, providing a highly available, scalable, and performant relational database with separate writer and reader instances for optimized workloads.
- Strengthening Security and Compliance:
- Integrated Vanta for continuous compliance monitoring, ensuring adherence to financial industry security standards.
- Configured AWS resources based on AWS Well-Architected Framework best practices, ensuring scalability, security, and cost optimization.
- Deployed OpenVPN on EC2 instances for secure access to private AWS resources, protecting sensitive data.
Business and Technical Process Transformation
The adoption of AWS and DevOps practices implemented by Hybytes resulted in transformative outcomes for Fingo Ecobank:
- Scalability and Reliability:
- AWS’s managed services enabled Fingo Ecobank to dynamically scale applications to handle fluctuating traffic demands, ensuring high availability across environments.
- Accelerated Time-to-Market:
- Automated CI/CD pipelines reduced deployment times from several hours to under 15 minutes, enabling rapid feature releases and iterative development.
- Improved Performance:
- Caching with ElastiCache and optimized database operations with Aurora PostgreSQL reduced latency, enhancing user experience.
- Enhanced Security and Compliance:
- Continuous compliance monitoring with Vanta and auditability through CloudTrail strengthened Fingo Ecobank’s security posture.
- Proactive Monitoring:
- The integration of CloudWatch and Datadog provided actionable insights, enabling proactive resolution of infrastructure issues and reducing downtime.
- Cost Optimization:
- AWS’s pay-as-you-go model and automated scaling reduced operational costs while maintaining high performance.
Managed Services
Long-Term Support
Hybytes provides ongoing support to ensure Fingo Ecobank’s cloud infrastructure remains scalable, reliable, and secure. This includes proactive monitoring, infrastructure optimizations, periodic security reviews, and continuous compliance tracking. Our long-term partnership ensures Fingo Ecobank can adapt to evolving business needs while maintaining operational excellence.
Key Benefits:
✔️ Proactive Infrastructure Enhancements – Regular updates to AWS architecture to optimize costs and performance.
✔️ Scalability Support – Ensure infrastructure can scale as Fingo Ecobank’s user base grows.
✔️ Security & Compliance Audits – Ongoing compliance monitoring with Vanta and AWS security best practices.
✔️ Disaster Recovery Planning – Business continuity planning with AWS backup & failover strategies.
DevOps Consulting and Implementation
Hybytes introduced a modern DevOps framework for Fingo Ecobank, ensuring agile, automated, and highly efficient development and deployment processes. By adopting Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), containerized workloads (Amazon EKS & Fargate), and automated CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions), we enabled rapid and error-free software releases.
Key Services Delivered:
✔️ Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – Terraform-driven automation for AWS infrastructure provisioning.
✔️ Microservices Architecture – Kubernetes-based deployment for scalability & resilience.
✔️ CI/CD Pipelines – Automated build, test, and deployment workflows with GitHub Actions.
✔️ Performance Optimization – Integrated Datadog APM & CloudWatch to monitor and optimize performance.
✔️ Observability & Debugging – Implemented CloudTrail logs & centralized monitoring for rapid issue resolution.
24×7 Incident Support
As a financial institution, Fingo Ecobank requires round-the-clock operational support to ensure high availability and seamless banking experiences. Hybytes provides 24×7 incident response, proactively monitoring logs, scaling infrastructure dynamically, and troubleshooting critical issues before they impact users.
Key Support Features:
✔️ Real-time Alerts – Integrated Datadog monitoring to detect & resolve issues immediately.
✔️ Automated Scaling & Failover – Amazon EKS and Aurora PostgreSQL auto-scaling to maintain uptime.
✔️ Incident Response Team – 24×7 support team ensuring business continuity.
✔️ Root Cause Analysis (RCA) – Post-incident reviews to improve resilience & prevent future issues.
✔️ Service Level Agreements (SLAs) – Guaranteed response times for incident resolution.
Cost and Account Governance
Hybytes continues to optimize Fingo Ecobank’s AWS spending while ensuring robust multi-account governance using AWS best practices. By implementing AWS Control Tower and cost monitoring tools, we ensure reduced unnecessary resource consumption and enforcement of security policies across all accounts.
Key Governance Enhancements:
✔️ Multi-Account Governance – AWS Control Tower setup for centralized policy enforcement.
✔️ Cost Optimization – Rightsizing instances, auto-scaling, and AWS cost monitoring to cut expenses.
✔️ Billing Insights – Integrated AWS Cost Explorer for real-time budget tracking.
✔️ Access & Role Management – Fine-grained IAM controls ensuring least privilege access.
✔️ Automated Security Policies – Implemented AWS Service Control Policies (SCPs) for account-level security compliance.
Security and Compliance
As a financial institution, security & regulatory compliance were top priorities for Fingo Ecobank. Hybytes designed an AWS Well-Architected security framework, incorporating encryption, identity management, and continuous compliance monitoring to meet financial industry standards.
Security Enhancements Implemented:
✔️ AWS Well-Architected Best Practices – Secure infrastructure design following AWS security guidelines.
✔️ Vanta Compliance Monitoring – Automated security checks and audit readiness.
✔️ CloudTrail & GuardDuty Integration – Continuous security auditing & anomaly detection.
✔️ Data Encryption – RDS Aurora PostgreSQL and S3 encryption for sensitive data protection.
✔️ Secure VPN Access – OpenVPN on EC2 for restricted access to AWS resources.
✔️ IAM Policies & Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) – Fine-grained access control mechanisms.
Results and Benefits:
Fingo Ecobank’s migration to AWS, guided by Hybytes, brought measurable business and operational improvements:
- 50% reduction in deployment times due to CI/CD automation.
- Significant increase in application scalability and reliability, leading to better user satisfaction.
- 30% cost savings achieved by leveraging AWS-managed services like EKS, Aurora, and S3.
Enhanced compliance and security, ensuring trust with customers and stakeholders.
About the Partner:
Hybytes is a leading technology solutions provider with over a decade of experience delivering innovative, scalable, and efficient services. Our expertise spans product development, Big Data solutions, DevOps, network monitoring, and AWS consulting. We also specialize in cloud computing, web and mobile application development, and data warehousing, leveraging the latest technologies to drive business success. By adopting agile methodologies, we ensure cost-effective solutions tailored to meet our clients’ unique needs. At Hybytes, we are committed to empowering businesses with cutting-edge solutions that deliver measurable results and drive growth.