The Client
Our client, BLUBIRD AUTO TRADE is a fintech startup specialising in providing small and flexible personal loans to the underserved market. The company used technology and data science solutions to minimise lending risks and to speed up the entire process. The majority of the company’s customers are salaried or self-employed professionals who are unable to obtain the required loans—for business/personal use—from regular lenders. 24×7 availability, sustained demand and excellent service had propelled the company to significant growth, with the result that it had grown its operations from less than ten locations to over 40 in just three years.
Challenges
As a result of its expanding operations, the company would need to induct an increasing number of web/mobile apps. To meet the anticipated boost in demand, it needed a better and more reliable tech-infrastructure. The company was currently using a mixed bag of open source and technology services. But this mix was not up to the task and there were many issues, ranging from performance issues to downtime, compromised best practices and lack of auto scaling, redundancy and disaster recovery.
Finally, as the business was set up on a public server, it was also vulnerable to risks, not to mention gappy monitoring and support. Clearly a more coherent and sustainable solution was needed.
Solution
After a detailed audit and several online meetings to understand the business, its objectives, challenges, and vision, our team decided that the ideal solution would be a cloud service provider that could handle the business’s entire infrastructure needs; offer proven infra-monitoring and management capabilities, including automation of routine tasks, security, back up and disaster recovery, among other cloud benefits…in other words AWS!
As an Advanced AWS Partner with ample experience and several successful cloud migrations under its belt, Teleglobal was successfully picked to run the project.
Solution
Since we were in the heart of the Covid-19 pandemic at the time, lockdowns had made physical meetings unfeasible. So Teleglobal’s team of cloud architects and migration specialists conducted several online assessments with the client’s teams, especially the DevOps team, to map requirements for the migration. Our assessments led to use of the following services in the migration to AWS. Our proposal factored in necessary best practices and business continuity principles.
Tech Stack
- AWS EC2 for its resizable compute capacity, which allowed scaling as needed. EC2 also offers IaaS, which we leveraged to acquire total control of computing resources.
- QWS IAM: to secure access to services and resources on AWS
- MS SQL Servers: The business was using Microsoft’s SQL Servers as their main database management solution. We successfully migrated the same without any downtime
- Amazon Aurora, managed by Amazon RDS. This ensured high security, reliability and availability.
- Amazon RDS: to manage Aurora. RDs also automates time intensive administration, which further optimized costs
- AWS WAF: To provide security to web applications and API’s from any attacks. This was a critical need, given that the client operated in the financial services space. WAF was also used to ensure no bottleneck in providing high availability while optimizing resource consumption.
- AWS CloudWatch: to monitor applications and flag any anomalies in resource utilization, server health, etc. so pre-emptive remedial action could be taken.
- 500% boost in customer handing capabilities
- Future scalability ensured
- ~30% savings through cost optimizations, despite higher traffic
- Visibly faster response time, and negligible downtime
- Automation of items like routine backup, fault tolerance, mirroring, etc., which were earlier dependent on manual intervention
- Improved user experience, as evinced by the loads of positive customer reviews
- Free AWS credits—a pleasant bonus
