50Fin Achieves 60% Faster Deployments by Migrating to AWS

About Customer

50Fin is a leading financial services company specializing in loans against securities, empowering Indian retail investors to unlock their investment potential by providing loans against securities at a competitive simple interest rate. With a focus on digitization, the platform simplifies capital markets lending, giving investors more flexibility and control over their finances. 

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‍Business Challenge

The customer’s existing cloud infrastructure was becoming increasingly costly and inefficient, affecting both scalability and overall operational performance. Their synchronization application, along with its supporting infrastructure, required a more optimized and reliable environment. Rising SMS costs due to international routing highlighted the need for a more cost-effective messaging solution. Additionally, the lack of automation in deployments and a monolithic repository setup limited their ability to customize and deliver faster. Security was also a concern, with a need for tighter network controls. 

To overcome these challenges, the customer was looking for a seamless solution that would reduce costs, enhance scalability, automate deployments and improve system security, all with minimal disruption to business operations.  

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Solution

To overcome these challenges, ShellKode migrated their critical synchronization application to AWS, taking full advantage of its robust features to ensure scalability and reliability. 

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Assessment

• ShellKode identified key pain points: spiking SMS costs due to international routing, limited scalability, security gaps, and deployment inefficiencies from a monolithic repository. To tackle these, we switched to AWS SNS with local routing, cutting expenses and implemented a custom CI/ CD pipeline using Lambda and CodeBuild to enable selective deployments with a single repository 

• We migrated the full stack using AWS MGN and DNS, ensuring scalability

• Migration included the entire application infrastructure to AWS, including VMs, storage buckets, database, container services, API gateway and transactional SMS services

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Network & Infra Setup

• Deployed resources in a private subnet, accessible securely through a client-server VPN, restricted to the client’s office network for enhanced security
• ShellKode leveraged AWS migration services like Application Migration Service (MGN), Database Migration Service (DMS), and Datasync, ensuring a swift, cost-effective migration with minimal disruption
• AWS Amplify was leveraged to host their front end applications, as they were having white label applications it was easy for them to host the same application with different domains by just changing the domain configurations that would roughly take 10mins to deliver it, which was not available with their previous cloud provider earlier
• Mapped AWS App Runner for container workloads, as they were minimal API handling applications and stateless

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CICD Setup

• Implemented auto-deployment with App Runner, enabling automatic detection and deployment of new images from Amazon ECR, eliminating manual deployments
• For this unique use case where the customer had a single repository with multiple projects in them, we had to build a new solution for them that involves the deployment of a single project(folder) inside the repository without affecting other projects
• A Lambda function was deployed using GitHub webhook URLs to detect changes within the project. Upon detecting a change, the Lambda function triggers AWS CodeBuild, passing in the specific project name as a variable to initiate the build and deploy in the required service

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Optimization & Observability

• Registered our sender ID (6 digit code) and templates with TRAI, then worked with AWS support to authenticate it for transactional SMS
• Their whole workload is now under complete observability using AWS CloudWatch and AWS SNS. Where all required business-critical alerts are in place to avoid business outages

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Results and Benefits

• Achieved up to 30% cost savings across infrastructure and messaging services
• Up to 25% faster delivery of white-label platforms to end customers
• Up to 60% faster CICD deployment and eliminated maintenance time on each pipeline
• Improved ease of use for 50Fin

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