Case Study - Responsive Accelerates Growth with AWS Infrastructure Automation and Microservices

Responsive is a fast-growing Canadian fintech company whose unified software platform empowers financial advisors to be more productive and engaging, providing clients with ongoing guidance to generate long-term wealth growth.

The Challenge

To support their rapid business expansion, Responsive's plan entails reducing the time and effort necessary to provision and operate AWS infrastructure for new and existing customers, as well as improving development processes and application architecture to enable faster iterations with fewer defects. Responsive sought AWS specialists to aid with establishing an AWS cloud best-practices secure foundation, enabling a robust and reliable microservices deployment and orchestration framework, and assisting with the adoption of AWS managed database services.

Our Solution

Responsive approached Aligned to provide expert support, guidance, and best-practices in refining and implementing their modernization plan. Aligned designed a multi-account environment based on the AWS Security Reference Architecture's guidelines for security, logging, and infrastructure management. It includes best practices for centralized identity and access management, logging and monitoring, infrastructure security, data protection, and threat detection and incident response. Using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), Aligned engineers implemented the architecture as infrastructure-as-code, enabling rapid and repeatable provisioning. As an added benefit, application tenant configuration and mapping to application workload resources are defined in a simple object model and programmatically expanded to CDK code, making it very easy to onboard new customers. Aligned's solution employs Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to run and scale the modernized microservices-based product suite. It provides the ability to deploy isolated versions of the application to support both single-tenant and multi-tenant instances, thereby minimizing infrastructure redundancy and reducing costs. In addition, Aligned provisioned AWS-managed Document DB and RDS for PostgreSQL clusters to replace the self-managed MongoDB and PostgreSQL instances to improve reliability and performance while reducing maintenance expenses. AWS Cognito was added to the solution to support the new standards-based authentication and authorization mechanisms and enable the introduction of new B2B product offerings. Finally, Aligned architects and engineers contributed to the design and implementation of Responsive's microservices-based application architecture, as well as the optimization of the continuous integration and delivery processes and procedures.

The Result

By working with Aligned to enable business growth, Responsive shortened the time to value for a solid, secure AWS cloud foundation. Responsive's operations team now benefits from centralized identity and access management, better logging and monitoring, and improved infrastructure automation. Adoption of Amazon EKS, DocumentDB, and RDS for PostgreSQL reduced operational costs while increasing resource utilization and application performance. Responsive's application developers benefit from being able to quickly spin up personal application instances in Amazon EKS for rapid development iterations in a production-like environment and quick responses to incidents. Customer account setup has been automated for both single and multi-tenant configurations, resulting in faster and error-free customer onboarding.