On-Premises to AWS: Modernizing Financial Services Infrastructure

Introduction

Jainam Broking Limited is a leading stock brokerage firm dedicated to empowering investments and securing financial futures. As the company expanded, its legacy on-premises infrastructure became a bottleneck, limiting scalability, increasing operational costs, and slowing down feature deployment. To overcome these challenges, Jainam decided to modernize its infrastructure by migrating to AWS, leveraging Kubernetes, automation, and cloud-native solutions to enhance performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.

Requirements

Jainam required a robust, scalable, and cost-effective cloud solution that could:

• Handle fluctuating market traffic efficiently.
• Improve resource management and scalability.
• Automate deployments for faster and more reliable releases.
• Optimize costs while maintaining high performance.
• Implement monitoring and alerting for proactive management.

Challenges

Jainam faced multiple challenges with its legacy infrastructure, including:

• Scalability Issues: The on-premises setup struggled to handle peak trading hours, leading to performance bottlenecks.
• High Costs: Running all workloads on EC2 instances resulted in excessive operational expenses.
• Inefficient Resource Management: Manual scaling and resource allocation led to inefficiencies.
• Slow Deployment Process: Lack of automation slowed down the release cycle, affecting business agility.
• Monitoring & Alerting Gaps: Limited visibility into infrastructure health impacted proactive issue resolution.

Solution

To address these challenges, Jainam adopted a cloud-native approach by migrating to AWS. The key solutions implemented included:

• AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) to run containerized applications with automated scaling.
• Application Load Balancer (ALB) Ingress Controller to expose resources securely.
• AWS Lambda to automate infrastructure downscaling aftermarket hours, reducing costs.
• Terraform for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to automate resource provisioning.
• GitLab CI/CD Pipeline to streamline and automate deployments.
• Amazon RDS for efficient and managed database services.
• Amazon ECR to securely store and manage container images.
• AWS CloudWatch for real-time monitoring with alerts configured for database instances.
• AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management) for role-based access control and enhanced security.
• AWS Budget Alerts to track and optimize cloud costs.
• AWS EventBridge for automating event-driven actions across AWS services.
• AWS CloudTrail for auditing and tracking API activity for security and compliance.

Approach

• Assessment & Planning:

  • Evaluated the existing on-premises setup and identified key bottlenecks.
  • Designed an optimized AWS architecture tailored for scalability and cost efficiency.

• Migration to AWS:

  • Shifted workloads from EC2 instances to AWS EKS, leveraging Kubernetes’ scalability.
  • Implemented ALB ingress for efficient traffic routing and secure exposure of services.

• Automation & Optimization:

  • Used Terraform to automate infrastructure provisioning and ensure consistency.
  • Integrated GitLab CI/CD for rapid and reliable deployment cycles.
  • Implemented AWS Lambda functions to scale down non-essential resources post-market hours.

• Monitoring & Security:

  • Configured AWS CloudWatch for real-time monitoring and alerting on infrastructure health.
  • Implemented IAM best practices for secure access management.

Services Implemented

• AWS EKS – Managed Kubernetes cluster for scalable container orchestration.
• AWS ALB Ingress Controller – For exposing services securely and efficiently.
• AWS Lambda – Automated infrastructure downscaling for cost efficiency.
• Terraform – Infrastructure as Code for automated provisioning.
• GitLab CI/CD – Automated deployment pipeline for faster releases.
• Amazon RDS – Managed relational database service for high availability.
• Amazon ECR – Secure, scalable container registry for Docker images.
• AWS CloudWatch – Real-time monitoring and alerting.
• AWS IAM – Role-based access control and security policy management.
• AWS Budget Alerts – Cost monitoring and optimization tool.
• AWS EventBridge – Event-driven automation and orchestration.
• AWS CloudTrail – API activity tracking and security auditing.

Architecture:

Benefits Achieved

• 45% Cost Reduction: Migrating from EC2 to AWS EKS significantly optimized costs.
• Seamless Scalability: Kubernetes autoscaling ensured optimal performance during peak trading hours.
• Faster Deployment: CI/CD pipeline reduced deployment time and improved release cycles.
• Improved Resource Efficiency: Automated downscaling of infrastructure minimized unnecessary resource usage.
• Enhanced Monitoring & Security: CloudWatch provided real-time insights, enabling proactive issue resolution.

Conclusion

By modernizing its infrastructure with AWS, Jainam Broking Limited successfully overcame the limitations of its legacy setup. The adoption of Kubernetes, automation, and cloud-native solutions resulted in better scalability, cost efficiency, and operational agility. This transformation not only optimized Jainam’s current infrastructure but also positioned the company for future growth and innovation in the stock brokerage industry.