Amdocs Studios solves complex cloud challenges for UK fintech
Custom solutions and Amdocs cloud expertise optimize cloud costs while strengthening performance and security on AWS
About the customer
A UK fintech providing CRM services for mortgage, lending and banking providers.
Challenge: Spiraling cloud costs due to database and monitoring problems
Following a UK fintech’s migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS), cloud engineering teams identified a rare and urgent database compatibility issue that was causing a growing cost problem. Amazon Aurora had been selected as the relational database solution, but it proved incompatible with the application, leading to query inefficiencies that hindered performance and drove up costs. Another problem stemmed from the customer's setup for its own clients. Each client had an individual public URL to access the CRM service, which created additional costs and complexity in EKS cluster monitoring.
Recognizing the need for expert cloud engineering skills, the customer engaged Amdocs.
“The database incompatibility issue was very unusual as Aurora should have been the ideal fit. Our AWS cloud engineering and database experts worked to identify the root cause of the problem and determine how to resolve it. Then we turned our attention to other matters that were preventing the customer from getting the full benefits of AWS.”
Solution: Tailored approaches optimize costs and performance
Amdocs' first step was evaluating the incompatibility with Amazon Aurora and determining whether to refactor or re-platform the customer's application. Following an initial assessment, the team decided on MariaDB – an open source relational database created by the original developers of MySQL – deployed via Amazon RDS for managed setup, operation, and scaling. This significantly improved performance, working more effectively with the application's query structure, while bringing costs down to an acceptable level.
With the database solution in place, Amdocs addressed the monitoring situation. The high number of public-facing URLs requiring monitoring made AWS' out-of-the-box solution disproportionately expensive. To overcome this, the team developed a bespoke EKS monitoring solution that met the customer's needs while reducing costs by 99%. The solution also included muting capabilities during customer maintenance, preventing unnecessary alerts to Amdocs' managed services team.
When penetration testing revealed additional protection needs, Amdocs deployed AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF), which protects against common web exploits and bots that can affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. The implementation also included the OWASP Top Ten ruleset aligned with industry standards, customized according to roles. Amdocs also deployed WAF in the pre-production environment to identify potential production issues.
Since AWS' managed rules for WAF defaulted to latest updates that weren't always application-compatible, the team also configured automatic updates in pre-production and manual updates in production environments to ensure updates proceeded only after full testing.
Outcome: Operational improvements enable innovation focus
The infrastructure changes and solutions brought the cloud strategy on track to achieve its goals improved cost management, stability and reliability, leading to thousands of dollars in monthly cloud cost savings – a substantial impact for a scale-up business. Amdocs also introduced measures to mitigate the risk of future performance issues.
Ultimately, the improvements enabled the in-house team to dedicate more time and effort to continual improvement and product innovation. In addition to this strong foundations in the cloud gave the business leaders confidence to execute their plans knowing the IT infrastructure could cope with accelerated growth.
