HomePortfolioFacilitating the Adoption of a FinTech Platform for 5,000 Institutions

Facilitating the Adoption of a FinTech Platform for 5,000 Institutions

Finance
Cloud-Native
Microservices
VMware

Planning to deploy the Tanzu Application Service platform at scale, a fintech provider turned to Altoros to resolve performance bottlenecks, enable operations transparency, optimize cloud resources, and improve security.

Facilitating the Adoption of a FinTech Platform for 5,000 Institutions

About the project

Brief results of the collaboration:

  • By acquiring the expertise in operating VMware Tanzu Application Service (TAS), the company laid the foundation for large-scale migration of its services—utilized by 5,000+ financial institutions daily—to a cloud-native platform.
  • Thanks to the enabled health monitoring, the customer was able to timely detect points of failure and save up to $90,000 on cloud resource utilization yearly.
  • With enforced security, a backup mechanism, and a disaster recovery strategy in place, the organization eliminated the possibility of losing access to its services deployed to TAS.
  • The knowledge gained around continuous integration/delivery helped the organization to further automate and streamline operations.

The customer

Based in the USA, the company is a fintech provider delivering asset, wealth, and risk management, as well as data analytics services and products. Daily, the customer handles transactions worth $8 trillion for 5,000+ organizations across 120 countries.

The need

The provider was running its tools in 5 cloud environments. Striving for improved management, automation, scalability, and high availability, the organization decided to adopt VMware Tanzu Application Service. As the first step, the company wanted to onboard one of its customers to TAS before large-scale adoption. Being new to the technology, the provider experienced certain difficulties around fine-tuning TAS to the in-house workflows, which could prevent scaling the platform to 5,000+ customers in the future.

So, the company turned to VMware for assistance. The vendor recommended Altoros, its trusted partner and a certified VMware Tanzu solutions provider, to help address the existing issues and deliver in-depth training around TAS enablement.

The challenges

Under the project, the team at Altoros had to address the following issues:

  • Having occasional downtimes at different levels of the deployment, it was hard to identify the point of failure due to the lack of monitoring.
  • Unified configurations across 5 cloud environments (1 sandbox, 1 development, 1 test, and 2 production) led to unexpected bugs and misuse or idleness of some services encapsulated as PCF tiles in TAS.
  • To facilitate the adoption of the platform at scale for thousands of organizations, there was a need to find deployment bottlenecks, identify manual operations, automate upgrades, as well as lay out a disaster recovery strategy.
  • Since the customer and its end users operate in a highly regulated financial industry, security and privacy required close attention.

The solution

Week 1. After analyzing the customer’s needs, engineers at Altoros tailored the training agenda to address the issues specific to that deployment. First, the developers introduced the in-house team to TAS components (Pivnet CLI, Ops Manager, PCF tiles, etc.), useful tools (Concourse), and cloud-native concepts (microservices).

Week 2. To improve security, the team at Altoros utilized AWS Secrets Manager and CredHub to avoid storing passwords, secure shell keys, IP addresses, etc., in a plain .xls document. Engineers also enabled role-based access control to restrict permissions and prevent altering data outside the scope of users’ authority.

Then, the team implemented the BOSH Backup and Restore framework, as well as helped the in-house division to create a disaster recovery strategy with a focus on platform resiliency in production.

Week 3. To enable monitoring, developers at Altoros integrated Wavefront and configured Healthwatch to gather relevant logs and metrics. With Healthwatch Dashboards and Resources, the in-house team got a unified view on the state of services, severity-based incident alerting, and resource utilization.

Week 4. Engineers at Altoros helped to identify which of the services available in TAS were crucial to optimal deployment performance and installed them as PCF tiles across all 5 cloud environments with uniform configuration.

The developers then showcased how to use Concourse to build continuous integration/delivery pipelines and automate upgrades. On top of that, the team at Altoros shared best practices around blue-green and canary deployments.

Finally, the experts explained how development and operations responsibilities are divided in TAS management, so that the in-house team would properly assign tasks without doing the same job twice or, even worse, ignoring it.

The outcome

Partnering with Altoros, the customer optimized its TAS deployment, improving security, enabling backups/disaster recovery, and automating platform upgrades. With health monitoring in place, the company was able to timely detect points of failure and save up to $90,000 on resource utilization annually. Thanks to the knowledge acquired around continuous integration/delivery, the organization is able to further streamline operations. Now, the company has the expertise to fully move its services—used by 5,000+ financial institutions daily—to TAS.

Technology stack

Platform

VMware Tanzu Application Service

Programming language

Java

Frameworks and tools

vSphere, Amazon Web Services, Spring, BOSH Backup and Restore, Wavefront, Healthwatch, IBM MQ, Concourse

Data store

Redis

$90,000

saved on
cloud costs

5,000+

customers
worldwide

$8T

in daily
transactions

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Ryan Meharg

Ryan Meharg

Technical Director

ryan.m@altoros.com650 265-2266

4900 Hopyard Rd. Suite 100 Pleasanton, CA 94588