How Bespin Global helped a leading fintech innovator improve development stability and speed up feature delivery.
How Bespin Global helped a leading fintech innovator improve development stability and speed up feature delivery.
REGION
Middle-East
COMPANY TYPE
Small – Medium Business
INDUSTRY
FinTech
CLOUD SOLUTION
Bespin also recommended the implementation of AWS RDS Aurora to combine the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases, driving both performance and cost reductions.
THE CUSTOMER
Moving fast without breaking things is fundamental to success in fintech. That reflects the approach of our client, a leading platform that automates and simplifies expense management processes so that companies can focus on growth, not admin.
By moving quickly, our client rapidly built a popular B2B application that delivers real-time visibility into business transactions and extensive flexibility, security, and control for business owners.
But with competitors nipping at their heels, our client needed to speed up feature delivery – including targeting specialist sectors such as tech companies, traders, hospitality, construction, and e-commerce.
However, rapid feature delivery has significant implications for the application development process. It’s intrinsically challenging to develop and publish a new feature… add tight deadlines, and it becomes virtually impossible without the right tools.
THE CHALLENGE
Agile application development empowers fintech innovators to roll out new features at speed, pivot fast when necessary, and effortlessly adapt to market trends and customer feedback. App developers need to tightly integrate agile development practices because those who don’t will see their competitors racing ahead.
But agility is more than just a mindset. Agile development also depends on the optimal use of the agile toolset: use the tools available optimally, and agility grows exponentially. Use tools incorrectly, and there is a risk that the development process breaks down and that feature updates break the app.
Even though our client already implemented agile development processes through AWS, their internal team felt that maximizing what AWS has to offer was not their core expertise – and that they needed an AWS expert to get the most out of AWS to empower agile development.
Maximizing agile development would allow the company to continuously, iteratively improve its app features based on real-world use and feedback, and reduce the risks associated with launching lots of big features at once.
The company hired Bespin Global as a partner to take the existing microservices architecture built on AWS and improve it further, maximizing the benefits that AWS offers for agile development. They also wanted advice and assurance that they’re following AWS best practices – including security monitoring.
THE SOLUTION
Speeding up agile development for our client meant comprehensively improving their existing AWS-based developer infrastructure to further enhance development agility, alongside a thorough review of their environment to ensure compliance with best practices and secure monitoring procedures.
One of the key improvements was the implementation of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows, aimed at improving developer efficiency and promoting development automation. Some of the AWS services used to make the development process more agile include:
- AWS Fargate: a serverless computer engine for containers that makes it easier to focus on building applications, rather than managing and provisioning servers.
- AWS CodeBuild: a continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages at speed without the need to provision, manage, and scale servers every time.
- AWS CodePipeline: automation for release pipelines, driving fast and reliable application updates through modeling and automating the steps required to release software changes.
The added automation had a profound effect on our client’s developer pipeline: making the development process more efficient and promoting significantly better collaboration within the team. However, Bespin also focused on risk management. What if there’s a problem with the code – what if something breaks during implementation?
“We, therefore, decided to implement a notification system into the CI/CD workflow to alert the development team about pipeline failures or failed testing during the deployment. We also added manual approval steps in areas where we think it was needed.” – according to Dania Al Refai, Senior DevOps Engineer at Bespin.
For instance, the Bespin team inserted a pause in the development process that requires manual approval whenever the client intended to release a new version of the application or when there are significant changes to the database in use. That lifted the reliability of the development workflow and allowed the team to address any issues promptly before they affected the production environment.
The cost was also an important driver: the less our client spent on AWS services, the more money to focus on development efforts. For example, in leveraging AWS ECS, Bespin’s team introduced auto-scaling capabilities, which led to significant cost savings as RAM and CPU usage was optimized according to demand.
THE OUTCOME
Bespin pushed the boundaries of AWS capabilities to ensure that a fast-paced, but resilient CI/CD workflow is at the heart of our client’s development process. It enabled our client to implement new expense-tracking ideas quickly: to push code out at speed thanks to automatic workflows that carried out the necessary building, testing, and deployment processes – with minimal risk.
We left no stone unturned in maximizing the capabilities of AWS and ensuring the AWS implementation is fully secure. Take, for example, the AWS Secrets Manager which protects access to resources by allowing developers to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve important “secrets” including database credentials and API keys.
“Secrets Manager brings improved security and further aids flexibility across the development process. Bespin also recommended the implementation of AWS RDS Aurora to combine the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases, driving both performance and cost reductions.”, says Dania.
Finally, we installed AWS GuardDuty to detect cyber threats to our client’s AWS accounts and workloads by identifying any unusual or unauthorized activity. Throughout the project, Bespin coordinated closely with our client’s development team to ensure smooth implementation.
RESULTS & BENEFITS
Enhancing the agility of our client’s development pipeline had a significant effect beyond the technical sphere, impacting their business model and strategy execution. We achieved that while maintaining operational excellence and optimizing costs.
The use of AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodePipeline increased the reliability of the development process, which, in turn, boosted the availability of services and reduced the risk of major problems when rolling out new features. The net effect was:
- Faster time to market: thanks to the optimal implementation of CI/CD methodologies platform now has a competitive advantage in getting features to the market.
- Improved quality and reduced risk: because every change to the codebase is tested and validated to catch errors early, it reduces the risk of introducing breakages in the production environment.
- Greater flexibility and adaptability: the iterative progress and ability to deliver rapidly means that the development team has the flexibility to roll out features for market testing – and to quickly adapt to competitors’ moves.
Now that our client can deliver new features even more quickly than before the fintech platform can look forward to faster customer acquisition while also promoting talent retention thanks to a fast-paced, but relaxed developer environment.
Moreover, our client is now geared to continue outpacing its competitors in the race to offer the most comprehensive, feature rich B2B spend management platform in the Middle East.
About Bespin Global, an e& enterprise company:
An AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and AWS Managed Service Partner, BESPIN GLOBAL MEA (Middle East and Africa) is a leading provider of automated cloud solutions and consulting services, including cloud adoption, strategy, migration, implementation, Managed Services, DevOps, FinOps and Data & Analytics. Bespin is positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Professional and Managed Services, as well as a “Visionary” in Gartner’s 2022 Magic Quadrant for IT Transformation Services.
In late 2022, Bespin Global MEA and e& enterprise formed a joint venture with the aim to assist enterprises in their digital transformation journey and eventually become the largest pure-play public cloud-managed and professional services provider in the Middle East, Turkey, Africa, and Pakistan.
Bespin’s cloud FinOps management platform, OpsNow offers an automated end-to-end solution for customers to effectively manage cloud assets and costs, optimize cloud expenses, and automate the implementation of cloud governance policies across multi-cloud environments.
Email: info@bespinglobal.ae
Address: The Offices 4, #138-139, One Central, Dubai World Trade Center (DWTC)
Telephone: 800 BESPIN (237746)
P.O. Box: 340729
