Responsive Accelerates Growth with AWS Infrastructure Automation and Microservices
Background
Responsive is a fast-growing Canadian fintech company whose unified software platform empowers financial advisors be more productive and engaging, and provide 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 minimising 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 in order to improve reliability and performance while reduce the maintenance expenses. AWS Cognito was added to the solution to support the new standards-based authentication and authorization mechanisms and to enable 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.
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As Responsive begins expanding into new regions, it is imperative that we work with partners who are experts in security, cloud architecture, and best practices for SOC 2 audits.
Our partnership with Aligned was essential for us to meet these technical objectives. We are excited to continue to partner with Aligned and would highly recommend Aligned to any business that wants to solve challenging architectural problems with a focus on security, scalability, and business growth.
- Chris Sanford, CTO
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Testimonials
We're extremely proud of our track record. Here are some of the words of appreciation from our clients.
As Responsive begins expanding into new regions, it is imperative that we work with partners who are experts in security, cloud architecture, and best practices for SOC 2 audits.
Our partnership with Aligned was essential for us to meet these technical objectives. We are excited to continue to partner with Aligned and would highly recommend Aligned to any business that wants to solve challenging architectural problems with a focus on security, scalability, and business growth.
Chris Sanford, CTO
Aligned was a fantastic engineering and architecture partner. They spearheaded the architecture and solution design for a key component of our technology platform, and worked with our teams to build it from the ground up.
As a product manager, I admired their ability to understand and effectively communicate the vision and strategy of what we were building to the rest of the engineering team.
In addition, I greatly appreciated their ability to effectively and independently manage our development team. With Aligned in charge, I always had confidence that we were making progress and working on the right thing.
Alyssa Myers, Director of Product Management
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