Fintech Galaxy was founded in the United Arab Emirates in 2018 as a regional platform that fuels innovation in financial services, drives ecosystem collaboration and facilitates integration between financial institutions and fintech companies. From scouting to deployment, Fintech Galaxy aim to build the future of financial services across the 22 Arab Countries.

Growing fast and furious

All FinTech industries make use of the latest technologies during their financial journey. Companies involved in this sector opt to provision a well-established platform that promotes greater security and higher resilience and bring greater customer satisfaction while utilizing the principle of least human efforts.

More FinTech companies have started to realize the power of cloud computing and the massive value it can provide while complying with international standards such as PCI DSS, ISO 27001, and ISO 20022. One of the main concerns these companies have faced is the lack of skills and resources to maintain a robust infrastructure in the cloud. Cloud computing thus allows ease of setup for highly available environments that require minimal human intervention while focusing on business needs and priorities instead of infrastructure.

Fortunately, Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud computing helped organizations like Fintech-Galaxy mitigate these concerns and make it easier to orchestrate the deployment of various AWS Services saving them a considerable amount of time managing, deploying, and debugging the underlying infrastructure.

Choosing the right provider:

Fintech Galaxy noticed the power of PaaS for their business needs and decided to leverage this service with AWS being the first public cloud to provide PaaS since 2011. Moreover, Fintech Galaxy has chosen to run its Microsoft Workloads on AWS because of its superior platform, proven experience, and global reach in addition to a 2x better price-performance for SQL servers and 7x fewer downtime hours than the next nearest cloud provider.

Why Us? Why Zero & One?

Fintech Galaxy had a tight deadline and wanted to publish their Windows Workload within a weekend, so they approached Zero & One a Premier AWS Partner specialized in automating Microsoft deployments onto AWS and focusing on Cloud Migration, Security & Compliance, and DevOps solutions. Zero & One dedicated a team of certified experts to assess and understand the current state of the Fintech Galaxy platform to offer the solution that meets the client’s needs.

Accordingly, the Zero & One team has highlighted the opportunities and challenges for building a highly resilient and secure windows workload on top of AWS Elastic Beanstalk that would address all the client’s challenges from quick deployments to simplicity and accessibility.

Seamlessly Deploy and Manage .NET Applications

The design shown in the below diagram illustrates all the services required to provide a scalable 3-Tier .NET web application that can be fully set up promptly. The core service used to deploy the .NET platform was AWS Elastic Beanstalk, an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services developed with .NET, PHP, Node. js, and more. Fintech Galaxy team was excited to witness the launch of this infrastructure with a couple of clicks through AWS CDK that we will talk about later in this use case. Elastic Beanstalk was used to provisions all the resources required for the Fintech Galaxy application that include two elastic load balancers, two autoscaling groups, and one Amazon EC2 instance for each of the Web and Application tier that can be scaled-out later depending on the needs. The infrastructure was also configured in a private network that spans multiple availability zones (AZs) to maintain increased security and availability for the web and application tiers in addition to Amazon RDS for SQL Servers with a multi-AZ deployment that provided more data durability, and fault tolerance.

Moreover, Developers were also able to deploy their code in minutes through the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio by following simple steps from their local machines and control their deployments by providing quick rollbacks and easy disaster recovery options from older versions that are kept and saved in Elastic Beanstalk. However, this type of deployment impacted the production application health and required a lot of effort from the operations and development team before and after the manual deployment. At this stage, Zero & One introduced a fully automated CI/CD pipeline using CodePipeline for a cost-effective, fault-tolerant architecture built on top of AWS CDK which is a software development framework that is used to define infrastructure in real code and provision it through AWS CloudFormation.

To begin from, our DevOps team created two separate stacks withing AWS CDK written in TypeScript that are responsible for first creating the Elastic Beanstalk Environment having two separate, but identical, environments—blue and green to increase availability and reduce deployment failure while the other will handle the Blue/Green CI/CD pipeline through AWS CodePipeline.

In this architecture, we have assumed that the blue environment is the production one that generally handles live traffic. The CI/CD pipeline is first triggered when new code is pushed to GitHub in the Source stage, Amazon S3 with Server-side encryption enabled for increased data integrity. Next, an AWS CodePipeline Invoke Action will fire up the AWS Lambda Function which has inline permissions attached to several IAM roles following the principle of least privilege will first describe the Elastic Beanstalk application and retrieves the environment “Status” before creating a new application version, Lambda function will then swap the URLs between the two environments blue/green keeping the production application untouched, update the blue environment with the latest application version, and perform some functionality testing. If the testing is successful, the code will perform another swap bringing the Blue environment to production with the latest release.

AWS CloudWatch was also configured for this infrastructure to monitor the Elastic Beanstalk instances utilization and send application and Lambda logs to a CloudWatch Log Group that will trigger alarms based on preconfigured metrics rules.

When simplicity brings efficiency

Ultimately, Zero and One Engineers helped increase customer productivity by ensuring the best use of Microsoft products in the cloud and ensured that the solution has met Fintech Galaxy’s critical business and technology objectives in a very short duration saving them more time than expected. Fintech Galaxy also realized a powerful performance and fast response time while running their windows workloads on AWS all given in a cost-effective monthly plan that guarantees an average return on investment (ROI) of 442% over the next five years.