Purple Next boosts their FinTech services with managed cloud native infrastructure

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Service type

Refactoring PoC; PCI-DSS compliant infrastructure refactoring for PHP applications;  Refactoring and migration from Azure VMs to AWS Kubernetes (EKS); Recurring Operations management Cloud Platform services. 

Industry

FinTech

Technology

AWS stack (EKS, ECR, S3, Route 53, CloudWatch, CloudTrail kubernetes, logging etc), Docker, Terraform, Traefik, Helm, CircleCI, Fluentd, Falco, Prometheus, PagerDuty

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Purple Next is a FinTech incubator that builds problem-solving and demand-driven solutions for the finance industry. It currently focuses on two main products: PayPipes - a payment management system for web-based payment processing, and Walletory - a digital wallet that simplifies payments when shopping, selling, or socializing online.

Summary

Purple Next is currently working on two applications, managing payments and movement of funds in a peer-to-peer ecosystem, both of which require a scalable and highly secure infrastructure. As their original self-hosted monolith was not able to keep up with the pace of projected growth and success, Purple Next made the bold decision to refactor both apps and upgrade them to a fully Cloud Native existence. Partnering up with Revolgy, they were able to keep focusing on business strategy and leave the heavy lifting to cloud experts who not only migrated the whole app to the cloud, but also set up a cutting-edge monitoring and maintenance system. Purple Next can focus on serving their customers and further developing their software, while it’s safely running, thanks to the Revolgy team and AWS.

Success comes with challenging decisions

In 2020, Purple Next started facing a problem that was caused by a welcome factor: they started growing rapidly by gaining popularity in the market. This, however, also meant higher demands on the infrastructure and data security. Privacy and security are the well-known Achilles heel of the FinTech industry. Purple Next stores, processes and transmits cardholder data (Visa, MasterCard, and other possible card brands) and therefore have got to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS). To make sure the system is secure and also robust and reliable with a 99.9% uptime, running the apps on self-hosted Virtual Machines did not seem like a scalable and long-term solution. It was evident that a change needed to be made, but it also implied a difficult decision: grow the in-house infrastructure team with all the expenses of hiring, ramp-up and payroll, or keep the already existing strategic Sys Admin position within the company and have him manage an external team of experts.

On-demand muscle to support business growth

To speed up the modernization process and manage long-term expenses in a scalable way, Purple Next decided to work with Revolgy, a trusted partner of their umbrella organization Purple Technology. Revolgy’s main objective is to make the transition to the cloud as seamless and pain-free as possible and also help with the maintenance of the system after deployment to prevent any breaks in business continuity for the clients. With this approach, the Revolgy team, with the in-house infrastructure lead, could take on a challenging project to migrate a monolith to a fully cloud-native infrastructure. The goal was an auto-scalable, cloud-based, managed IT infrastructure that can follow the growth of the business at a flexible pace.

“Based on the fact that the Purple Tech group has already been cooperating with Revolgy, we decided to have them refactor and migrate our previous IT infrastructure and outsource to them the management of the new IT infrastructure.”

Zdeněk Pokorný, Product Manager

Transforming to Cloud Native in only 4 months

The project included a complete infrastructure re-platforming from virtual machines on Azure to Kubernetes on AWS. The choice for Amazon EKS came from Revolgy’s solid understanding of Purple Next’s needs from previous projects in the Purple Technology group and a joint effort with the internal ICT team to evaluate the existing infrastructure and analyze the possibilities. AWS was chosen as it provides highly available and secure clusters and automates key tasks such as patching, node provisioning, and updates.

“We didn't have so much professional experience with AWS. Since Revolgy is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and has the expertise with AWS services, we were confident to proceed with the change from Azure to AWS and let Revolgy refactor our old infrastructure to the AWS managed services.”

Zdeněk Pokorný, Product Manager

As part of this 4-month project, the whole ecosystem was migrated with proper backup and disaster recovery. Achieving such a comprehensive and fundamental change came with its challenges that the two teams tackled within professional and fruitful cooperation, strengthening their relationship and improving their processes for the next iterations.

“We figured out together how to achieve a more stable, scalable IT infrastructure with high availability and 24/7 IT support. We get our peace of mind and our customers get consistent professional services.”

Zdeněk Pokorný, Product Manager

The door is now open to conquer new horizons

The modernization of their architecture gives Purple Next the stability and agility to provide their customers with a secure and reliable service, and also to release improvements and enhancements in an agile way. The fact that the migration was executed as one coherent project in such a short time yields a strategic advantage in terms of the response time to market changes and continuous technology improvements.

“We're now definitely ready to expand our technology. We decided to cooperate with Revolgy to break our limits and expand our business potential to its best.”

Purple Next made a two-fold financial gain with their decision to outsource. Not only did they quickly get their hands on expert hands to migrate to AWS, they also relieved the company from managing the expenses of maintenance in a rigid way with increasing investments.

Having a flexible OpEx with Revolgy’s managed cloud services, the company can focus on strategy both in terms of their product and their expenses. Peak times and daily operations are not tasking the internal team, therefore the core business bandwidth can be focused on business continuity, risk mitigation, security, and keeping up with the market. Purple Next is now working with Revolgy on increasing security standards (such as Access Control, polishing IPS/IDS, and patching campaigns).

“Assessing the outsourcing to Revolgy, we definitely reduced costs of what we would need to invest to maintain the infrastructure internally.”

Zdeněk Pokorný, Product Manager


Photo of Staging-to-Production celebration :)