Benow India

• Being a startup the Time to Market was very crucial and it was more important to invest less in infrastructure management resources and more in resources required to deliver the core business.
• Limiting the upfront capital costs – i.e. shifting infrastructure costs from capex to opex.
• Provisioning infrastructure that is compliant to various industry standard security like PCI DSS. 
• Ability to scale on demand – scale resources up and down as needed, thus allowing for rapid growth.

• Benow is a new generation platform for financial transactions and thus required a modern decoupled approach and architecture that would be scalable, reliable (provided high availability) and a secure infrastructure that met the industry security standards and all this while being cost effective.
• Considering the requirements of this new generation platform AWS Cloud was the perfect fit to deliver the project.
• Additionally, the data residency requirements meant that the financial data has to stay within the country of operation.
• A highly available solution using load balancers was provisioned with the database responsibility with RDS ensuring high performing yet redundant database service which was scalable as per the need with minimum downtime and optimized performance.

• The Benow team completed the infrastructure provisioning in 2 week’s time for multiple environments whereas an on-premise setup would have required several weeks if not months.
• The on-demand scalability and elasticity ensured that the organization did not over provision the infrastructure and could scale as per the need.   
• The company had a better ability to match revenue with expenses i.e. they paid for the resources they used, which equates to how much traffic and revenue they are bringing in the company.
• a. Since AWS takes care of the underlying infrastructure security and compliance it was easier for the business to concentrate more on the security of the application and the system.

Architecture & AWS services Overview

EC2 Instances

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) were provisioned after thoroughly analyzing the applications CPU / Memory utilization and right sizing the instance. EC2 instances along with Load balancers ensured high availability.

RDS MySQL

Using RDS MySQL the managed database service with a Multi Zone availability ensured not only less database management but the Multi AZ setup ensured redundancy which is very crucial for any financial application.

S3 buckets

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance was used to store the several images, files and the snapshots created as part of the backup & archival strategy.

IAM security

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enabled to manage access to AWS services and resources securely which ensured secure and easy access of the team to the AWS resources.

Amazon CloudWatch

Was used for monitoring and management service IT managers and the project team to provide data and actionable insights to monitor applications, understand and respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health of the entire system.