Case Study – FinTech Customer

About the customer

FinTech Customer faced several challenges in building a secure, compliant, and highly available financial services platform.

Manual and inconsistent deployments created operational instability, while the lack of standardized environments. The platform struggled to scale efficiently across its 12+ microservices, especially during peak transaction loads, and maintaining service reliability became increasingly complex.

Limited observability and fragmented monitoring slowed down issue identification and impacted service uptime. Critical workloads relied on a mix of databases—PostgreSQL, Document DB, and Hazel cast—without proper cross-region replication or DR readiness, exposing the system to availability risks.

Hybrid connectivity with banks via Direct Connect and VPN added further operational overhead, especially without a unified network and security governance model. The absence of fully automated CI/CD pipelines delayed deployments, increased manual errors, and restricted the ability to release updates reliably.

Challenges

Infrastructure Complexity: – DTBX operated 12+ microservices built on Java 17, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Hazel cast, and Nginx. Managing these services without container orchestration made deployments inconsistent and difficult to scale.

Limited Scalability & Resource Isolation: – Their workloads required precision scaling, isolated execution, and predictable performance to meet customer SLAs—especially for banking clients.

Lack of Multi-Environment Governance: – DTBX required dedicated Production, UAT, and DR environments with full isolation and controlled failover. Existing environments lacked standardized architecture and automated recovery capabilities.

Operational Overheads and Manual Processes: – Deployments were manual, slow, and error-prone. CI/CD pipelines were not fully integrated with containerized workflows, resulting in deployment inconsistency.

Disaster Recovery Gaps: – No automated cross-region replication, multi-region failover, or DR-ready compute infrastructure existed.

Connectivity & Security Complexity: – The environment needed to support secure connectivity from banks via Direct Connect, VPN tunnels, and isolated developer access through a dedicated VPN VPC.

Unreliable Service Communication: – Inter-service communication was not stable, leading to message delivery failures.

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Solution

To design and implement a robust cloud-native architecture across Production, UAT, and DR environments, using AWS best practices and future-ready microservices standards

  • Infrastructure Setup
  • AWS VPCs:

Created separate VPCs for Production, DR and UAT to ensure environment isolation.

  • Each VPC includes:

Private subnets for backend workloads (EKS, databases)

Public subnets for Application Load Balancers and bastion hosts

VPC Peering for secure inter-environment communication

  • Security:

Used IAM roles and security groups for least-privilege access

Network-level isolation via private subnets and restricted ingress rules


  • Application Deployment with EKS + Argo CD
  • Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service):

Deployed containerized microservices (e.g., Api-Router, Auth, Logging, Fault-tr, MIS, Notification, Hazel cast, Cache-service, Master, Frontend)

Each microservice runs as an isolated deployment

Scalable with AWS Fargate for serverless container orchestration

  • Argo CD:

Implemented GitOps for continuous deployment.

Watches Git repositories for manifest changes

Automatically syncs updates to EKS clusters (Prod/UAT)

Provides a visual dashboard for deployment status and rollbacks


  • CI/CD Pipeline Automation
  • Code Workflow:

1. Developers push new code → Docker images built and pushed to Amazon ECR

2. AWS Event Bridge triggers Code Build

3. Code Build updates the Argo CD Git repository with the new image tag

4. Argo CD detects the change → deploys updated containers automatically to EKS


  • Load Balancing & Access

Application Load Balancers (ALB) for secure HTTP/HTTPS routing

Network Load Balancers (NLB) for secure and scalable and static IPs.

Bastion (Jump) Hosts for controlled administrative access to private subnets

External access restricted via security groups and Route 53 DNS management


  • Environments:

UAT for testing and validation

Production for live workloads

DR for Disaster Recovery


All orchestrated under GitOps & AWS principles.

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Solution Diagram

  • Amazon CloudFront – Global CDN to cache and deliver static assets closer to users, reducing latency.
  • Elastic Load Balancer (ALB) – Distributes incoming traffic evenly across instances for performance stability.
  • AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) – Protects applications from common web exploits (SQLi, XSS, etc.).
  • AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) – Manages granular access control using least privilege principle.
  • AWS CloudTrail – Tracks all user and API activity for auditing and compliance.
  • Amazon RDS Automated Backups – Enables automatic daily backups for databases.
  • AWS Backup – Centralized backup management across AWS resources.
  • Amazon CloudWatch – Monitors system metrics, sets alarms, and provides dashboards for visibility.

Outcome

Fintech Customer evolved into a secure, scalable, and enterprise-grade cloud platform optimized for financial workloads, delivering high availability, automated operations, and robust multi-environment governance across Production, UAT, and Disaster Recovery.


High Availability for Financial-Grade Workloads

• Multi-AZ RDS and Document DB deployments with cross-region replicas ensured continuous data availability.

• DR environment in Hyderabad enabled rapid failover with continuously replicated databases.

Enhanced Scalability & Performance

• Amazon EKS on Fargate delivered automatic scaling for all 12+ microservices.

• The platform now seamlessly handles high transaction loads from banking clients without performance degradation.

Improved Connectivity & Reliability

• Direct Connect (primary + secondary) provided a high-bandwidth, low-latency private link to banking networks.

• Site-to-Site VPN ensured secure backup connectivity and improved overall network resilience.

Automated Deployments & CI/CD Optimization

• Container images managed through Amazon ECR with automated pipelines enabling consistent deployments.

• Release processes became predictable and error-free, reducing manual effort significantly.

Advanced Data Resilience & Disaster Recovery

• Continuous cross-region database replication ensures near real-time data synchronization.

• Standby EKS cluster in DR region allows rapid rehydration of workloads during failover.

Stronger Security & Compliance Posture

• Isolated VPCs for each environment, private ALB/NLB routing, and role-based access controls ensured secure communication.

• VPN VPC for developers established controlled and auditable access pathways.

Optimized Operational Costs

• Fargate-based compute removed EC2 management overhead and reduced idle resource cost.

• Automated UAT start/stop schedule further reduced non-production expenses.

Improved Developer Productivity

• Isolated VPN access streamlined CI/CD, and automated deployments allowed developers to focus entirely on feature delivery.

• Consistent infrastructure across environments reduced debugging time and improved release confidence.


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