3Doge is a wallet-based application that has a comprehensive portfolio of payment solutions, providing customers with the efficiency, security, and support they need to compete in today’s business landscape.
3Doge was facing significant challenges in managing its IT infrastructure, which allowed it to gain control and visibility across its systems. They had been experiencing substantial growth in their customer base, with the need to scale infrastructure across multi-cloud environments.
This case study explores how TekBay empowered 3Doge to redefine its infrastructure and provided incremental value by automating the management at scale of a large number of cloud services and resources.
Key Challenges: Infrastructure Management
The client encountered multiple critical challenges in managing their infrastructure for their custom cloud-based solution due to a fragmented approach. The lack of integration between their core systems – such as the configuration management database, security, and monitoring tools led to inefficiencies and operational bottlenecks with increased downtime and delays in deploying new applications and instances.
As the company grew, scaling their mono-repositories to meet increasing customer demands became difficult, resulting in the following challenges:
- Manual provisioning of infrastructure with human errors and inconsistencies
- Absence of standardized infrastructure configurations added operational complexities
- Ensuring compliance with security standards and industry regulations
Our Solution: Terraform Implementation
3Doge recognized the need for a reliable partner to address the challenges and redesign a modern, cost-effective, and secure infrastructure solution.
This transition was further enhanced with Terraform as the Infrastructure Automation solution instead of AWS CloudFormation, considering the series of strategic benefits the platform offers.
Terraform’s multi-cloud feature played an important role in operating a heterogeneous cloud environment, which wouldn’t have been possible with AWS CloudFormation since it was primarily developed for services residing solely in the AWS cloud. Client’s Name was particularly benefited with its modularity, enabling the building of reusable infrastructure components, which made scalability possible as compared to CloudFormation’s monolithic approach.
Terraform has a rich ecosystem of providers and plugins that can be integrated with most third-party tools and services seamlessly. With inbuilt state management with locking mechanisms to realize super control and consistency, the platform has more holistic infrastructure management capabilities, making it a better choice for the 3Doge.
Terraform Implementation Process:
1. Assessing and Planning
- Addressed the existing infrastructure to identify where there could be improvements.
- Strategic planning for infrastructure improvement.
2. Terraform Adoption
- Terraform was used as the Infrastructure as Code (IAC) tool to manage infrastructure programmatically.
3. AWS Resources Provisioning
- Provisioned AWS resources, including servers, databases, and storage, with granular configuration.
4. Security Enhancements
- Organized security groups and network access control lists (NACLs) to control the traffic.
- Specifically, IAM defines the roles and policies for controlling access to resources.
- Turned on data encryption to protect sensitive information.
- Set up Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and subnet configurations.
5. Compliance Adherence
- Addressed the existing infrastructure to identify where there could be improvements.
- Enabled audit logging with AWS CloudTrail to monitor actions on resources.
- Implemented Amazon GuardDuty for threat detection and automatic alerts
- Use of AWS Config for compliance checks
6. Scalability and Cost Management
- Implemented Auto Scaling Groups to scale resources based on demand.
- Use of Reserved Instances to cut costs for on-demand resource usage over a long-term.
7. Monitoring and Alerting
- Set up Amazon CloudWatch to monitor AWS resources and applications, collect metrics, and trigger alarms.
8. Continuous Improvement
- Constantly reviewed and refined infrastructure automation in response to changing needs.
Benefits:
By implementing Terraform, 3Doge has significantly improved its IT infrastructure management, achieving the following key benefits:
- Streamlined management processes and reduced downtime
- Enabled Rapid Scaling across a multi-cloud environment
- Standardized configurations and minimized errors
- Faster development and streamlined deployment of cloud products
- Strengthened security measures and compliance
- Continuous improvement and flexibility for future business needs
By strategically adopting Terraform, 3Doge has established a foundation for future growth with its adaptable infrastructure. The platform’s multi-cloud capabilities, along with state management, have significantly solved operational issues to achieve efficiency. Through increased standardization, 3Doge was able to position itself as a leader in the competitive fintech market.
Outcomes:
- Infrastructure Code Coverage: 85% of infrastructure components are managed by Terraform, improving automation and consistency.
- Configuration Drift Rate: 3% of configurations drifted, controlled through regular detection and automated correction.
- Time to Provision Infrastructure: Average provisioning time is 10 minutes per component using Terraform.
- Mean Time to Recover (MTTR): Recovery from incidents averages 1.5 hours, aided by automated restoration with Terraform.
Conclusion:
Terraform was chosen over AWS CloudFormation because it supports a multi-cloud, modular, and state management third-party integration capability. This solution is not just about solving the operational issues at present, but also ensures that the foundation laid down allows them to move forward with growth and innovation.
The client has been able to achieve huge efficiency, security, and scalability improvements by working with core systems and standardizing the configurations of infrastructure. With increased centralization and standardization, 3Doge remains on point in today’s competitive fintech market.
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