Challenges

Excrow, a B2B company, approached us to help modernize their infrastructure and support their growing operational demands. As a trusted provider that empowers banks and financial institutions to serve as third-party protectors of customer funds during transactions, Excrow needed a platform to handle increasing transaction volumes and provide seamless reliability.

Their infrastructure, hosted on DigitalOcean, was no longer sufficient to meet their scalability and performance needs. Managing all the unique environment variables across multiple application instances posed significant challenges, leading to inefficiencies and operational risks. To address this, we developed and executed a migration plan to transition their infrastructure to AWS.

The Challenge: Scaling to Meet Growing Demands

As Excrow’s user base and transaction volumes grew, they encountered several challenges:

1. Performance and Scalability: The existing infrastructure struggled to handle increased transaction loads reliably.
2. Environment Management: Managing the environment-specific configurations across multiple application instances was becoming increasingly complex and error-prone.
3. Operational Overhead: Their self-hosted PostgreSQL database required substantial manual maintenance, adding to the team’s workload. Excrow needed an infrastructure capable of scaling with its growth, reducing operational complexity, and ensuring high availability for its mission-critical applications.

Our Approach: Migrating to AWS for Reliability and Efficiency

We worked closely with Excrow’s engineering team to design a tailored migration strategy. The approach addressed their immediate needs while laying a solid foundation for future growth.

Database Migration to Amazon RDS: Excrow’s PostgreSQL database was migrated to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. This transition eliminated the need for manual maintenance, introduced automated backups, and enabled high availability through Multi-AZ deployments. Using AWS Database Migration Service (DMS), the migration was carried out with minimal downtime, ensuring uninterrupted service and data consistency.

Simplified Application Deployment on Elastic Beanstalk: Excrow’s applications were deployed on AWS Elastic Beanstalk to streamline management and improve reliability. Elastic Beanstalk’s support for auto-scaling and multi-AZ configurations ensured the platform could handle varying traffic loads while maintaining fault tolerance.

Dynamic Management of Environment Variables:Excrow’s operations required managing over 50 environment variables for their applications, each tailored to specific configurations. However, Elastic Beanstalk's built-in environment variable management was not suitable for handling such a large number. To overcome this limitation, we utilized the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store to centralize and securely manage the environment variables. Custom scripts were developed and integrated into Elastic Beanstalk’s .platform folder, enabling the application to retrieve and inject these variables during startup dynamically. This approach streamlined the process, minimized manual intervention, and reduced the risk of configuration errors.

Automating Infrastructure with Terraform: To ensure consistency and efficiency, we used Terraform for provisioning and managing AWS resources. This approach automated the creation of RDS instances, Elastic Beanstalk environments, security settings, and network configurations, making deployments faster and more reliable.

Enhanced Monitoring and Security: We implemented AWS CloudWatch for real-time monitoring and AWS CloudTrail for logging and auditing. These tools provided actionable insights into application performance and infrastructure security, enabling proactive issue resolution and operational transparency.

The New AWS Architecture: Modern and Scalable

The new infrastructure introduced several key AWS components:

Looking to the Future

1. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL: A managed database service offering automated backups, Multi-AZ deployments, and improved scalability.
2. AWS Elastic Beanstalk: Simplified application hosting with custom scripts for dynamic environment configuration.
3. AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store: Secure and centralized storage for managing environment-specific variables.
4. Terraform: Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for consistent and automated resource provisioning.
5. AWS CloudWatch and CloudTrail: Tools for monitoring and logging to ensure visibility and security.