Case Study for Fingo

Fingo

About the Customer:

Fingo, 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 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’s operations were constrained by:

  1. Scalability and Reliability Issues:
    • Heroku’s platform limitations hindered Fingo’s ability to scale applications dynamically and manage increasing traffic demands.
  2. Manual Infrastructure and Deployment Processes:
    • Infrastructure provisioning and code deployments were manual and error-prone, leading to show release cycles and inconsistencies across environments.
  3. Limited Monitoring and Observability:
    • Monitoring tools provided fragmented insights, making it difficult to identify bottlenecks and optimize application performance.
  4. Security and Compliance Concerns:
    • As a financial company, Fingo required stringent security measures and compliance capabilities that Heroku struggled to meet.

Fingo sought a modern, automated, secure solution to overcome these limitations and drive business transformation.

Partner Solution:​

Hybytes implemented a comprehensive DevOps transformation for Fingo, leveraging AWS services to build a scalable, automated, and secure architecture.

  1. Transitioning from Heroku to AWS with Automated Infrastructure Management:

Adopting Infrastructure as Code (IaC):

  • Migrated Fingo’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.
  1. Hosting Applications in Amazon EKS with Fargate:
  • All of Fingo’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.
  1. 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 to achieve rapid, reliable, and error-free deployments, reducing deployment times from hours to minutes.
  1. 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.
  1. Improving Scalability and Performance:
  • Utilized Amazon ElastiCache (Redis) for caching, reducing latency and database load.
  • Migrated Fingo’s database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, providing a highly available, scalable, and performant relational database with separate writer and reader instances for optimized workloads.
  1. 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.
  1.  

Business and Technical Process Transformation

The adoption of AWS and DevOps practices implemented by Hybytes resulted in transformative outcomes for Fingo:

  1. Scalability and Reliability:
    • AWS’s managed services enabled Fingo to dynamically scale applications to handle fluctuating traffic demands, ensuring high availability across environments.
  2. 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.
  3. Improved Performance:
    • Caching with ElastiCache and optimized database operations with Aurora PostgreSQL reduced latency, enhancing user experience.
  4. Enhanced Security and Compliance:
    • Continuous compliance monitoring with Vanta and auditability through CloudTrail strengthened Fingo’s security posture.
  5. Proactive Monitoring:
    • The integration of CloudWatch and Datadog provided actionable insights, enabling proactive resolution of infrastructure issues and reducing downtime.
  6. Cost Optimization:
    • AWS’s pay-as-you-go model and automated scaling reduced operational costs while maintaining high performance.

Results and Benefits:

Fingo’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.