Executive Summary
A large cross-border P2P payments and money transfer company based in southern United States is undergoing a remarkable transformation from a brick and mortar model, with over 347,000 agent offices worldwide, to a digital payments and money-transfer powerhouse with nearly half of all their transfers taking place online. The organization wanted a solution that would allow them to scale around the seasonal peaks in traffic, rapidly develop new features for their customers, and support their large network of global offices.
Business Challenges
As a P2P payments and money transfer company, this organization, our customer, sees seasonal spikes in their traffic. They were looking for a solution that would allow them to scale out rapidly to handle heavy traffic, without the need to maintain a data center at 100% capacity.
Additionally, the organization has recognized increased competition from emerging fintech startups. They were looking for a solution that was not only scalable but would enable the rapid development and deployment of new features that would help them stay ahead of the competition.
Finally, such a large agent network requires a highly stable and secure set of internal tools. They required a migration partner that could modernize and migrate their internal tools without causing an outage to the agents and support personnel.
Our Solution
Microservice Migration and Modernization
To prepare their existing on-prem services for migration to AWS, SixthUp provided several teams to audit, understand and re-design each service. The SixthUp migration team upgraded Springboot services and other java applications, leveraging Veracode and Splunk to identify and fix potential dependency vulnerabilities.
K8 migration
Partnering with our customer, SixthUp teams migrated services (both Nginx and istio-based) and applications to AWS EKS. Our developer teams assisted in latency testing and code tuning while providing training on AWS best practices and processes.
Services on EKS workloads protected by AWS Private Link. One API Gateway per namespace, and each api gateways will have different stages for individual environments. Services are only consumed through Apigee.
Devops
SixthUp DevOps teams worked to build automated pipelines for testing and deployment, as well as infrastructure automation. Our DevOps experts worked strategically to choose the best tools, eventually selecting and helping to implement GitLab.
Application Modernization
Applications not suited for containerization were lift-and-shift migrated to EC2 instances. SixthUp engineers helped set up IaaS for Oracle DBs and IBM Websphere servers.
Impact/Key Benefits to the Client
With the highly scalable AWS cloud infrastructure in place, the customer has been able to bring features, like their new crypto wallet, to market much faster than before. Additionally, the customer was able to leverage SixthUp’s globally located teams to take advantage of time zone overlaps. While we didn’t implement a full follow the sun model, our delivery centers in South Africa and India were able to provide after hours work and SRE
