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A secure and scalable cloud platform for a rapidly growing fintech app

How The Server Labs helped a FinTech to build a scalable and secure platform as their app skyrocketed.

When a FinTech in the Americas launched a new digital wallet app – the first in its country – the app’s use skyrocketed. Growth was outstripping expectations and the FinTech needed to ensure that their cloud platform was optimised to support this rapid growth. Cloud experts The Server Labs helped them build a scalable and robust cloud infrastructure.

Value at a glance

Re-architecting AWS cloud environment to support rapid scaling and agility
Auto scaling groups, load balancing, optimisation and container management
Infrastructure to support current and future business growth with greater resilience

A mobile phone screen showing a bank balance

Value at a glance

Re-architecting AWS cloud environment to support rapid scaling and agility
Auto scaling groups, load balancing, optimisation and container management
Infrastructure to support current and future business growth with greater resilience

Banking Digital Transformation

The need for a secure, scalable architecture

The banking sector is embracing digital transformation. As part of that transformation, a large state-owned bank and a digital Fintech partnered to launch a digital wallet app. The app allows users to pay, collect, send and receive money via their mobile device. The FinTech’s aim is to help individuals manage their money more effectively, to help small businesses grow by streamlining payments - and by doing so support a prosperous and sustainable economy.

The app delivered exactly what the market required, and take-up was strong. Within the first six months of launch, the app had 750,000 users and was forecast to reach over 1,000,000 users within the first nine months.

With such massive growth, the FinTech needed to ensure that its AWS cloud infrastructure could scale rapidly. Cloud experts The Server Labs had the expertise and experience to ensure rapid scaling to meet the enormous customer demand.

Scaling the infrastructure

The Server Labs (TSL) provided a team of AWS platform and DevOps engineers to work on assessing the platform and making and implementing recommendations for re-architecting it. The Server Labs team brought deep skills in:

AWS infrastructure automation
Auto-scaling
Docker container management
Kubernetes
Network Load Balancer (NLB) and Application Load Balancer (ALB)
Mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS)
GitHub
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (AWS VPC)
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Identity and access management (IAM)

Image of a man in a white shirt touching a phone screen

Scaling the infrastructure

AWS infrastructure automation
Auto-scaling
Docker container management
Kubernetes
Network Load Balancer (NLB) and Application Load Balancer (ALB)
Mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS)
GitHub
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (AWS VPC)
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Identity and access management (IAM)

Architecture and infrastructure

Documentation, testing and support

The assessment, re-architecting and scaling project was broken down into the following key steps:

Step 1 – Initial architecture discovery.

TSL carried out a WellArchitected Review, which determined that the application was deployed in four EC2 monoliths with static public IPs and no failover.

Step 2 – Make and implement infrastructure recommendations. These included:

Auto Scaling Groups (ASG) to meet the rapid scaling requirements across Development, Pre Production, and Production. This automatically maintained balance and optimisation across all availability zones.
Remove non-scalable containers. Containers that could not be autoscaled were removed from autoscaling groups.
Set up VPC peering. The TSL Team added components to the architecture, setting up VPC peering between Pre Production and Development.

Step 3 – Documentation.

TSL provided detailed documentation and guidelines on sizing for autoscaling, and runbooks to release new docker images with the EC2 Auto Scaling solution.

Step 4 – Testing and support.

TSL carried out testing and provided support in post go-live configurations.

Project succcess

The FinTech can support the digital wallet app’s rapid growth with an agile, scalable infrastructure platform.
Auto Scaling Groups on EC2 instances have enhanced the application’s scalability and resilience.
Adjusted architecture and new configuration provide a balanced and optimised system.
The FinTech can continue to grow and achieve its mission in the digital transformation of banking.

Get in touch

Image of finger touching a screen that has an image of a cloud

Project succcess

The FinTech can support the digital wallet app’s rapid growth with an agile, scalable infrastructure platform.
Auto Scaling Groups on EC2 instances have enhanced the application’s scalability and resilience.
Adjusted architecture and new configuration provide a balanced and optimised system.
The FinTech can continue to grow and achieve its mission in the digital transformation of banking.

Get in touch

The success of the app meant that the FinTech found itself needing to scale its cloud infrastructure very rapidly and remain robust and secure. We designed an architecture to enable them to do just that.