This blog post was originally published on the AWS Japan website. It has been translated for our English readers.

Written by  Sadanobu Fujikawa
Translated to English by Beatriz Maeireizo, Makoto Watanabe, Jun Ueda and Craig Bossie

 Infcurion is developing an embedded FinTech business that incorporates financial functions into various services, mainly through their platform services, “Wallet Station” and “Xard”, as well as providing platforms and consulting services in the financial and payment domains. They migrated “Wallet Station” to AWS in November 2022. In this blog post, we will share the voice of the customer regarding the benefits of the migration, from their initial considerations all the way through the post-migration efforts.

Considerations in the Assessment Phase

Infcurion began considering a migration to AWS in January 2022. They found that migrating to AWS would be most effective for them in the following three respects:

• Architecture that enables them to meet business requirements
  When Wallet Station service was first launched, they initially thought AWS would not meet their Disaster Recovery (DR) and security requirements. However, with the launch of the Osaka region in March 2021, they confirmed its compliance with Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) safety standards, and found that this would not be a barrier to migrate to AWS.

• Career Development for Engineers
  Many of Infcurion’s engineers are either already proficient in AWS technologies or are seeking to gain greater proficiency. Because of this, their teams expressed the desire to migrate in order to gain more experience using AWS, to help with their own career development. Since maintenance support was placing an increasing burden on the engineers, Infcurion’s leadership decided to take the engineers’ position into consideration.

• Cost
  After consulting with AWS Sales and Solution Architecture teams on potential post-migration architectures, they decided to move to an architecture that incorporated AWS managed services such Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) using Linux containers on AWS Fargate and Amazon RDS for SQL Server. Migration to these services would help them to reduce overall costs.

Architecture

When migrating to AWS, was selected as a container engine, GitHub and GitHub Actions for CI/CD, and Amazon RDS for SQL Server as a database platform. By using AWS Fargate, they could achieve significant cost savings through right-sizing containers and tuning resource settings, so that only the necessary CPU and memory were configured.

They migrated their database from SQL Server to Amazon RDS for SQL Server. Initially, they considered migration to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, but they selected Amazon RDS for SQL Server instead, to help accelerate their migration speed.

Infcurion’s AWS Architecture

Benefits of Migrating to AWS

Infcurion migrated to AWS in November 2022, approximately 10 months after they began to consider a move to the cloud. Because of the migration, field engineers can now focus on their core business, and their overall productivity has increased. For example, regarding managing infrastructure, AWS offers a wide range of APIs and tools. Now, environments that used to take five days or more to provision can now be created in one day or less.

They have adopted AWS services to meet their business requirements related to deployment. There is plenty of documentation and other information available online for them to use. Furthermore, the ability to consult with the  AWS Solution Architecture and Support teams, to confirm architecture and service choices, has improved their overall speed of development.

From an operational standpoint, the extensive documentation and case studies available from AWS provides Infcurion’s engineers with a sense of confidence. Also, because of the sensitive nature of the payment data handled by the service, there is an increased emphasis on security. By using managed services such as AWS WAF in their architectures, they can meet their strict security requirements quickly.

They were able to reduce their infrastructure costs by approximately 30% compared to their pre-migration spends by optimizing sizing and improving the CI/CD process with the adoption of AWS Fargate.

Next Steps

“AWS frequently releases new services and functional improvements, which allows us to speed up the implementation of the customer requirements that will likely emerge in the future. We hope to leverage these releases to optimize our architecture as our business expands.”  – Hiromichi Nagata, Executive Officer, CTO, Infcurion Inc.

Now that they have migrated to AWS, Infcurion is looking to further optimize their architecture.

• How to serve a broader range of industries and companies
  They are in the planning stages of developing a provisioning method that can be further scaled based on the size of the business. They would like to reach more customersand make the architecture flexible enough to improve development speed and optimize costs so that can incorporate the that Infcurion provides.

• Enhanced Security
  The company would like to use AWS services to achieve even more robust security, such as through DevSecOps, to enable capabilities like the automation of vulnerability scanning in their CI/CD pipeline.

• Database Modernization with Amazon Aurora
  Infcurion has initially adopted Amazon RDS for SQL Server to reduce time required for application migration. However, in the future they would like to consider a fully cloud-based database such as Amazon Aurora, so that they can take advantages of the performance, scale, and other features such as high availability using multiple AWS region.

Summary

Infcurion has improved its engineers’ career development and reduced challenges related to cost by migrating applications to AWS. In the future, they would like to continue to optimize their architecture by taking advantage of more of the benefits of AWS. They plan to design an even more flexible architecture that expands their adoption of AWS products and services. They will improve their database availability by modernizing to Amazon, helping to further enhance their services for their customers.

AWS can help you assess how your company can get the most out of cloud. Join the millions of AWS customers that trust us to migrate and modernize their most important applications in the cloud. To learn more on modernizing Windows Server or SQL Server, visit Windows on AWS. Contact us to start your modernization journey today.