Company Description and Problem
Globify is a FinTech company that offers innovative financial assistance for a company’s employees through the company’s payroll as well as traditional micro loans directly to private individuals. The Globify platform was already hosted on AWS. Globify approached Disraptor to do a full analysis and review of their AWS set-up. Performance issues and cost-cutting areas were identified.
Solution
Based on this analysis, we seamlessly migrated their production environment to an EC2 instance type that would increase performance. The EC2 instance type that was previously used was not optimal for Globify’s production use case (T3 instance type). AWS recommends this instance type for development and test environments, hence Disraptor moved this to an M5 instance type which has higher bandwidth and does not need to accumulate CPU credits. Disraptor also enabled monitoring and logging on key metrics using AWS CloudWatch, CloudWatch Agent and VPC flow logs to monitor incoming and outgoing network traffic.
Disraptor also identified ways of reducing cost by cleaning out unwanted EBS snapshots and reducing the EBS volume sizes on the production environment. All EBS snapshots were done manually prior to the engagement – Disraptor automated the snapshot and retention of AMI’s using AWS Lambda and AWS API. This has helped Globify a great deal for defining Backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) policies and procedures.
Outcome
Globify users are based in South Africa, however, the production environment was deployed in the Ohio region. This resulted in intermittent issues with latency when the platform was accessed on certain Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Disraptor advised Globify that they should migrate to the Ireland region for performance improvements on latency across all ISPs (At the time, the AWS Cape Town region was not available). We performed the migration with minimal downtime with the use of AMI snapshots and AWS’ feature of migrating AMI’s across regions. This resulted in minimal configuration and a smooth region migration of the platform.
