Fintech company’s journey from On-Premise to Azure

Introduction

This case-study explores the Infra scalability journey of a prominent Fintech solutions provider based in Pune, India, who provides payment gateway solutions for businesses.

They manage critical infrastructure on-premises to host their services and cater to clients primarily based in India.

Problem

1. The inability to rapidly adapt to fluctuating user demands due to on-premise infrastructure limitations.
2. Downtime during maintenance and updates affecting critical financial systems.
3. On-premise limitations hindering the agility required to function in the fast-paced fintech space.

Objectives

1. Implement a seamless migration from on-premise to Azure for business scalability.
2. Ensure high availability of financial services to meet customer expectations.
3. Establish automated processes for efficient deployment and resource management.

Implementation

1. Azure Migration:
   • Utilized Azure Migrate and Site Recovery for minimizing downtime during migration.
   • Implemented Azure VMs and Kubernetes for scalable and flexible compute infrastructure.
2. High Availability Measures:
   • Setup Azure Availability Sets and Availability Zones for redundancy across Azure West India and South India regions.
   • Implemented Application Gateway for distributing and scaling the web traffic.
   • Set up automated backups and failover mechanisms to enhance reliability.
3. Automated Deployment and Resource Management:
   • Adopted GitLab for continuous integration and deployment.
   • Utilized Terraform to implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates for spinning up infrastructure.
   • Utilized Azure Monitor and Zabbix for real-time insights into application and infrastructure performance.

Results

1. Scaling Metrics:
   • Achieved 85% reduction in time required to scale infrastructure.
   • Scalability improved by 75%, accommodating increased user loads seamlessly.
2. Availability Metrics:
   • 98.9% uptime achieved post-migration.
   • Downtime during updates reduced by 97%.
3. Migration Success:
   • Migration completed within the planned timeframe.
   • Minimal impact on ongoing financial services during the migration process.

Challenges

1. Migration Complexity:
   • Overcoming challenges associated with data migration and application compatibility.
   • Learning: Thorough planning and testing are critical for successful cloud migration.
2. Security Considerations:
   • Addressing security concerns associated with cloud adoption.
   • Learning: Collaborating with internal team and experts to implement and evaluate the security measures.

Conclusion

The successful migration to Azure and the adoption of DevOps practices have significantly improved the business’s agility to scale and maintain high availability for crucial services.

Continuous monitoring, training, and refinement of processes are in place to sustain and enhance these improvements.