Fingo Ecobank
About the Customer:
Fingo Ecobank, an African-based neobank, is dedicated to providing financial services to underserved communities. Their vision of enabling financial inclusivity required a scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure. Initially hosted on Heroku, Fingo Ecobank faced challenges in meeting the demands of its growing user base. Limitations in scalability, deployment speed, and compliance with industry standards hindered their ability to deliver high-quality services effectively.
To address these challenges, Hybytes, an AWS Partner, designed and implemented a cloud-native architecture on AWS, embracing modern DevOps practices to enhance scalability, performance, and operational efficiency.
Customer Challenge:
Fingo Ecobank, a fast-growing digital financial services provider, was seeking to modernize its cloud infrastructure to support greater agility, performance, and compliance. As the company scaled, so did the complexity of its operational and regulatory requirements.
Scalability and Reliability Needs
With rising user demand and increasing traffic, Fingo Ecobank needed an infrastructure that could scale dynamically and maintain consistent performance under load.
Accelerated Development and Deployment
To support rapid innovation and continuous delivery, the company aimed to automate infrastructure provisioning and streamline its deployment processes, ensuring consistency across development and production environments.
Enhanced Observability and Insights
Deeper visibility into application and infrastructure performance became essential for proactive troubleshooting and optimization, especially in a high-availability environment.
Security and Compliance Readiness
Operating in a regulated industry, Fingo Ecobank required a solution that aligned with financial industry standards for security, auditing, and data protection.
Sustained Operational Support
To maintain service quality and manage costs effectively, the company needed continuous monitoring, proactive incident management, and a cost-optimized, support-ready architecture.
Fingo Ecobank engaged Hybytes to design a cloud-native solution on AWS that would address these evolving requirements and enable long-term digital growth.
Partner Solution:
Hybytes led a comprehensive DevOps and cloud transformation initiative for Fingo Ecobank, designing a secure, scalable, and automated cloud environment on AWS to meet the demands of a rapidly growing financial platform.
Cloud-Native Architecture Design
We transitioned Fingo Ecobank’s infrastructure from a monolithic to a containerized architecture, enabling efficient orchestration, high availability, and auto-scaling of services. The new environment was designed for flexibility across multiple environments to support development, testing, and production workflows.
Infrastructure as Code & Automation
Hybytes implemented infrastructure as code (IaC) principles to ensure consistent, repeatable provisioning of cloud resources. This approach eliminated manual errors, reduced configuration drift, and accelerated environment setup. CI/CD pipelines were introduced to automate builds, deployments, and testing, allowing for faster and more reliable release cycles.
Observability & Operational Excellence
Real-time monitoring, alerting, and logging were integrated to provide end-to-end visibility into infrastructure and application performance. The solution included enhanced observability tools to proactively detect issues, optimize performance, and support compliance reporting.
Security & Compliance Alignment
The new architecture was built following AWS best practices, incorporating strong security controls, network segmentation, and continuous compliance monitoring. These measures ensured alignment with industry standards required for operating in the financial sector.
- Hosting Applications in Amazon EKS with Fargate:
- Fingo Ecobank Ecobank’s microservices were containerized and deployed on Amazon EKS with Fargate.
- Frontend Services: Hosted on EKS for efficient orchestration and scalability.
- Backend Services: Deployed across environments using consistent Kubernetes deployment manifests.
- EKS ensured automatic scaling, fault tolerance, and seamless integration with AWS services.
- Automating Development and Deployment Processes:
- Implemented CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions to:
- Build Docker images for all microservices.
- Push images to Amazon ECR (Elastic Container Registry).
- Deploy containers to EKS across all environments automatically.
- This enabled Fingo Ecobank to achieve rapid, reliable, and error-free deployments, reducing deployment times from hours to minutes.
- Enhancing Monitoring and Observability:
- Configured AWS CloudWatch for centralized monitoring of application logs and resource metrics, providing real-time visibility into performance.
- Enabled AWS CloudTrail to log API activities and track changes for auditing and compliance.
- Integrated Datadog for advanced observability:
- Forwarded logs and metrics from CloudWatch to Datadog using a Lambda function.
- Created detailed dashboards and set up alerts to monitor application performance and detect anomalies.
- Used Datadog’s Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to trace and optimize application behavior.
- Improving Scalability and Performance:
- Utilized Amazon ElastiCache (Redis) for caching, reducing latency and database load.
- Migrated Fingo Ecobank’s database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, providing a highly available, scalable, and performant relational database with separate writer and reader instances for optimized workloads.
- Strengthening Security and Compliance:
- Integrated Vanta for continuous compliance monitoring, ensuring adherence to financial industry security standards.
- Configured AWS resources based on AWS Well-Architected Framework best practices, ensuring scalability, security, and cost optimization.
- Deployed OpenVPN on EC2 instances for secure access to private AWS resources, protecting sensitive data.
Business and Technical Process Transformation
The adoption of AWS and DevOps practices implemented by Hybytes resulted in transformative outcomes for Fingo Ecobank:
- Scalability and Reliability:
- AWS’s managed services enabled Fingo Ecobank to dynamically scale applications to handle fluctuating traffic demands, ensuring high availability across environments.
- Accelerated Time-to-Market:
- Automated CI/CD pipelines reduced deployment times from several hours to under 15 minutes, enabling rapid feature releases and iterative development.
- Improved Performance:
- Caching with ElastiCache and optimized database operations with Aurora PostgreSQL reduced latency, enhancing user experience.
- Enhanced Security and Compliance:
- Continuous compliance monitoring with Vanta and auditability through CloudTrail strengthened Fingo Ecobank’s security posture.
- Proactive Monitoring:
- The integration of CloudWatch and Datadog provided actionable insights, enabling proactive resolution of infrastructure issues and reducing downtime.
- Cost Optimization:
- AWS’s pay-as-you-go model and automated scaling reduced operational costs while maintaining high performance.
Managed Services
Long-Term Support
Hybytes provides ongoing support to ensure Fingo Ecobank’s cloud infrastructure remains scalable, reliable, and secure. This includes proactive monitoring, infrastructure optimizations, periodic security reviews, and continuous compliance tracking. Our long-term partnership ensures Fingo Ecobank can adapt to evolving business needs while maintaining operational excellence.
Key Benefits:
✔️ Proactive Infrastructure Enhancements – Regular updates to AWS architecture to optimize costs and performance.
✔️ Scalability Support – Ensure infrastructure can scale as Fingo Ecobank’s user base grows.
✔️ Security & Compliance Audits – Ongoing compliance monitoring with Vanta and AWS security best practices.
✔️ Disaster Recovery Planning – Business continuity planning with AWS backup & failover strategies.
DevOps Consulting and Implementation
Hybytes introduced a modern DevOps framework for Fingo Ecobank, ensuring agile, automated, and highly efficient development and deployment processes. By adopting Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), containerized workloads (Amazon EKS & Fargate), and automated CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions), we enabled rapid and error-free software releases.
Key Services Delivered:
✔️ Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – Terraform-driven automation for AWS infrastructure provisioning.
✔️ Microservices Architecture – Kubernetes-based deployment for scalability & resilience.
✔️ CI/CD Pipelines – Automated build, test, and deployment workflows with GitHub Actions.
✔️ Performance Optimization – Integrated Datadog APM & CloudWatch to monitor and optimize performance.
✔️ Observability & Debugging – Implemented CloudTrail logs & centralized monitoring for rapid issue resolution.
24×7 Incident Support
As a financial institution, Fingo Ecobank requires round-the-clock operational support to ensure high availability and seamless banking experiences. Hybytes provides 24×7 incident response, proactively monitoring logs, scaling infrastructure dynamically, and troubleshooting critical issues before they impact users.
Key Support Features:
✔️ Real-time Alerts – Integrated Datadog monitoring to detect & resolve issues immediately.
✔️ Automated Scaling & Failover – Amazon EKS and Aurora PostgreSQL auto-scaling to maintain uptime.
✔️ Incident Response Team – 24×7 support team ensuring business continuity.
✔️ Root Cause Analysis (RCA) – Post-incident reviews to improve resilience & prevent future issues.
✔️ Service Level Agreements (SLAs) – Guaranteed response times for incident resolution.
Cost and Account Governance
Hybytes continues to optimize Fingo Ecobank’s AWS spending while ensuring robust multi-account governance using AWS best practices. By implementing AWS Control Tower and cost monitoring tools, we ensure reduced unnecessary resource consumption and enforcement of security policies across all accounts.
Key Governance Enhancements:
✔️ Multi-Account Governance – AWS Control Tower setup for centralized policy enforcement.
✔️ Cost Optimization – Rightsizing instances, auto-scaling, and AWS cost monitoring to cut expenses.
✔️ Billing Insights – Integrated AWS Cost Explorer for real-time budget tracking.
✔️ Access & Role Management – Fine-grained IAM controls ensuring least privilege access.
✔️ Automated Security Policies – Implemented AWS Service Control Policies (SCPs) for account-level security compliance.
Security and Compliance
As a financial institution, security & regulatory compliance were top priorities for Fingo Ecobank. Hybytes designed an AWS Well-Architected security framework, incorporating encryption, identity management, and continuous compliance monitoring to meet financial industry standards.
Security Enhancements Implemented:
✔️ AWS Well-Architected Best Practices – Secure infrastructure design following AWS security guidelines.
✔️ Vanta Compliance Monitoring – Automated security checks and audit readiness.
✔️ CloudTrail & GuardDuty Integration – Continuous security auditing & anomaly detection.
✔️ Data Encryption – RDS Aurora PostgreSQL and S3 encryption for sensitive data protection.
✔️ Secure VPN Access – OpenVPN on EC2 for restricted access to AWS resources.
✔️ IAM Policies & Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) – Fine-grained access control mechanisms.
Results and Benefits:
Fingo Ecobank’s migration to AWS, guided by Hybytes, brought measurable business and operational improvements:
- 50% reduction in deployment times due to CI/CD automation.
- Significant increase in application scalability and reliability, leading to better user satisfaction.
- 30% cost savings achieved by leveraging AWS-managed services like EKS, Aurora, and S3.
Enhanced compliance and security, ensuring trust with customers and stakeholders.
About the Partner:
Hybytes is a leading technology solutions provider with over a decade of experience delivering innovative, scalable, and efficient services. Our expertise spans product development, Big Data solutions, DevOps, network monitoring, and AWS consulting. We also specialize in cloud computing, web and mobile application development, and data warehousing, leveraging the latest technologies to drive business success. By adopting agile methodologies, we ensure cost-effective solutions tailored to meet our clients’ unique needs. At Hybytes, we are committed to empowering businesses with cutting-edge solutions that deliver measurable results and drive growth.