Summary
A UK-based Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) provider partnered with 500 retailers, aiming to expand its reach and offer flexible payment solutions. The UK BNPL market, valued at £11.46 billion in 2023, is projected to reach £58.72 billion by 2030 with a CAGR of 22.2%.
The company faced challenges with its legacy infrastructure, affecting scalability, customer experience, and operational efficiency. By migrating to a cloud-native architecture with microservices on AWS, they achieved better performance, reliability, security, and operational cost reductions.
Business Challenges
Infrastructure Challenges:
- Scalability Bottlenecks: The monolithic architecture hindered scalability and deployment, limiting market responsiveness.
- Non-Scalable Infrastructure: Local data center reliance restricted growth and affected service availability.
- Manual Accounting: Absence of automated accounting made processes error-prone and time-consuming.
- Latency Issues: Synchronous operations increased system latency, impacting real-time performance.
- Compliance Integration: Lack of automated regulatory enforcement complicated compliance processes.
Application Services Challenges:
- Manual Financial Workflows: Manual financial transactions led to inefficiencies and data inaccuracies.
- Tightly Coupled Plugins: Client-facing plugins were tightly bound to the core system, limiting expansion and feature additions.
Frontend and Backend Challenges:
- Outdated Frontend: Angular.js became difficult to maintain, stifling innovation.
- Data Replication Issues: Replication constraints impeded business growth.
Solution Approach
Adoption of Cloud-Native Architecture: Migrating to a cloud-native architecture with AWS services provided improved scalability, flexibility, and deployment efficiency.
Technology Selection:
- Frontend Shift: Moving from Angular.js to Vue.js improved maintainability and user experience.
- Backend Microservices: Migrating to a PHP Laravel-based microservices architecture enhanced modularity and scalability.
Technical Implementation Highlighting Cloud Transformation
Cloud Migration Process: AWS services like EKS for containers, RDS for databases, and S3 for storage were leveraged, along with Lambda and SQS for event-driven processing.
Microservices Architecture: Each Laravel-based microservice used its own MySQL database on RDS, ensuring data isolation, scalability, and security.
CI/CD Integration: Automated deployments were enabled with Docker, AWS ECR, and BitBucket, managed with Helm on AWS EKS.
Testing & Monitoring: TestLink and Selenium were used for testing, while CloudWatch provided real-time monitoring and insights into system performance.
Results and Benefits
- Improved Performance and Scalability: Cloud-native architecture enabled horizontal scaling and handled higher transaction volumes.
- Faster Development: Microservices and automated CI/CD pipelines reduced development time and operational costs.
- Increased Reliability: AWS services ensured high availability and better disaster recovery.
- Enhanced Security: AWS GuardDuty, Security Hub, and KMS ensured compliance and robust security.
- Better Customer Experience: Faster checkout, smoother e-commerce integration, and higher customer satisfaction were achieved.
