HomePortfolioEnsuring Security and High Availability a Fintech App with Amazon EKS

Ensuring Security and High Availability of a FinTech App with Amazon EKS

Cloud-Native
Finance
AWS
Kubernetes

A provider of FinTech services turned to Altoros to improve security, performance, and time-to-market through migration to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS).

Ensuring Security and High Availability of a FinTech App with Amazon EKS

Executive Summary

Brief results of the collaboration:

  • Thanks to the hands-on training delivered by Altoros, the customer gained expertise to automatically deploy and scale its flagship app on Amazon EKS.
  • By getting experience in image registry scanning, CIS benchmark testing, and governance with policy management, the organization can now work out an in-depth defense strategy.
  • With recommendations around logging, monitoring, and health checks, the company can ensure fault tolerance of the deployed clusters and improve availability.
  • By applying practical knowledge around automating and managing continuous integration/delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, the company can decrease deployment time to minutes.

Reinventing financial services

The customer's flagship app enables corporate employees from 50,000+ companies in the USA to access their earnings before an actual payday. To do so, users connect the app to their bank account and borrow up to $100 daily. When the paycheck arrives, the borrowed money will be automatically withdrawn from a bank account with no fee. In addition, users can authorize the provider to negotiate a lower price for medical bills on their behalf.

As long as the app stores and processes sensitive information—bank account details, transactional data, a social security number, etc.—data privacy is of the utmost importance. Serving 24 million users already and aiming to expand, the organization also strove for high availability and scalability. Delivering an innovative product in an exceedingly competitive industry, it was crucial for the company to speed up feature delivery from an idea to production.

Hosting the app on AWS-based infrastructure, the customer decided to adopt Amazon EKS—a fully managed Kuberetes service that has all the necessary tooling for securing, scaling, monitoring, and load-balancing apps.

Relying on Altoros as a certified Kubernetes service provider, the company wanted to facilitate migration to Amazon EKS through an in-depth training around security, high availability, scalability, fault tolerance, and CI/CD automation.

About the customer

Headquartered in Palo Alto, the company is a FinTech provider with a market value of $530+ million as of September 2020. The customer’s flagship product is a mobile app that enables millions of corporate workers to take a microloan with no fee before a payday.

The challenges

To ensure a fruitful and efficient collaboration, the training’s agenda had to resonate with the customer needs described above. In addition, the topics should align with the in-house team skills and specifics of the financial industry.

Driving migration to Amazon EKS with hands-on training

After auditing the company’s requirements, Altoros developed a custom three-day training that weighs in the priorities and enables to act accordingly. With a strong focus on hands-on practice, the program is based on the methodology field-tested on Global 2000 companies.

To enhance cluster security, our engineers introduced the customer’s in-house team to the CIS benchmarking that serve as a recognized standard for safeguarding a Kubernetes deployment. Furthermore, the training dived into image registry scanning, various API authentication methods, and governance with policy management to build a defense strategy upon.

The trainees learned how to load balance resources in order to achieve scalability using the tooling available in Amazon EKS. In addition, the experts at Altoros shared best practices of facilitating issue detection and automating disaster recovery by configuring health checks. Our instructors introduced the in-house team to the technology stack (Elacticsearch, Prometheus, Graphana, etc.) that facilitate logging and monitoring. With this knowledge, it is possible to track failures and perform timely debugging.

Finally, the attendees examined how to automate, manage, and troubleshoot CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins, Concourse, and Spinnaker to decrease the deployment time to minutes.

The outcome

The company gained the necessary expertise to maintain its Amazon EKS deployment, enabling enterprise-grade security, high availability, and scalability. Driving the migration to Amazon EKS through the knowledge shared, the customer will also be able to speed up feature delivery. Now, the organization has a clear path forward and a close partnership with Altoros for implementation and support.

Finally, the delivered training provided a foundation for the customer’s in-house engineers to pass the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer exam.

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Ryan Meharg

Ryan Meharg

Technical Director

ryan.m@altoros.com650 265-2266

4900 Hopyard Rd. Suite 100 Pleasanton, CA 94588