Scalable AWS Infrastructure from Scratch for Expense Management Startup, Wings

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FivexL had a transformative impact on the Wings team workflow. Within three months, FivexL experts configured AWS Organization, access control, and streamlined launches of multiple applications via AWS ECS. This established a solid foundation for the startup’s future growth and enabled the development team to concentrate on innovation and rapid iteration.
 

Project Success: Managed by Vladimir Samoylov, Architected by Ivan Razzhivin

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Ivan Razzhivin

Certified AWS Architect AWS ECS and Terraform Expert
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Vladimir Samoylov

Senior Cloud Engineering Consultant AWS Community Builder Certified AWS Architect 10+ years experience in ops, infra automation, development Python/Machine Learning Enthusiast, Immutable Infrastructure Advocate
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About Wings

Wings is a fintech startup that addresses the challenges of online payments. They have developed a smart expense management service for corporate clients, enabling the issuance of virtual bank cards. The acquaintance between Wings and FivexL began with a problem the startup faced. They lost access to their AWS account and sought help on various forums and in AWS professional communities. Confused by responses like ’nothing can be done’ and faced with costly, risky proposals, the team was worried they had lost access to their data for good. FivexL senior consultant Vladimir, after reading about the startup’s issues, quickly understood the problem and, on a volunteer basis, helped Wings regain access in just 20 minutes. This marked the beginning of a successful collaboration.

Challenge

FivexL had a transformative impact on the Wings team workflow. Within three months, FivexL experts configured AWS Organization, access control, and streamlined launches of multiple applications via AWS ECS. This established a solid foundation for the startup’s future growth and enabled the development team to concentrate on innovation and rapid iteration.
Wings embarked on a journey to launch their MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to validate their unique business proposition. The initial infrastructure in AWS was clicked manually in AWS web UI by the Wings team. However, as the idea proved its viability, the need for a more robust, repeatable, and scalable infrastructure became evident.

The first iteration of the application was built by the Wings team using a monolithic approach using AWS Elastic Beanstalk as a computing platform. While this allowed the team to launch the MVP quickly, it posed product modifications and scalability challenges. Economically, this approach was not sustainable because every new client got a separate instance, causing resource usage overhead and higher-than-optimal infrastructure costs.

Recognizing the limitations of the monolithic architecture, Wings decided to engage experts to transition towards a microservice multi-tenant architecture. This architecture allows companies to save money on infrastructure costs by using the same computing resources for several clients residing within the same multi-tenant application deployment.

Solution

FivexL treats every customer as a future unicorn regardless of where they are on their journey.
FivexL specialists recognized that Wings would greatly benefit from using FivexLs IaC AWS foundational infra templates to establish an application delivery platform that would allow them to productize MVP and take the company to the next level of scale.

FivexL established a solid base for the upcoming thousands of users and the challenges associated with growth, layering one foundation block upon another.


Set Up AWS Organization

To prevent future issues with lost access to AWS and to centrally manage and govern the AWS environment during growth and scaling, FivexL established an AWS organization. This foundational step is crucial for ensuring the safety and stable evolution of the product. AWS Organization was configured according to best practices, and security measures like AWS CloudTrail and GuardDuty were set up. To foster efficiency and transparency, FivexL set up daily sync/demo/backlog review calls and Kanban board for tasks tracking.

First App - Establishing a Microservices Platform

At this stage FivexL empowered Wings developers to build and deploy applications with enhanced security features in a fast, standardized, compliant, and cost-efficient manner using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). FivexL consultants sep up a microservices platform for Wings that simplifies deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications. They also created a Dockerfile and launched the first application within the ECS cluster.

Infrastructure as Code

FivexL adopts a DevOps-centric approach to infrastructure, treating it the same way developers handle code. Utilizing Terraform’s open-source IaC tool and community-driven modules, FivexL created Wings’ infrastructure for both speed and reliability. This standardization not only minimizes manual tasks and human error but also speeds up infrastructure development process. The adoption of high-quality community standards also ensures that the infrastructure is easily understandable, making for a smoother transition for any future engineers on the project.

Availability and Monitoring
FivexL sped up client traffic to microservices by enabling AWS Global Accelerator. A concerted effort was made to enhance the productivity of developers through tools like X-Ray and various alerting mechanisms, customized log streaming, ECS features and metrics.
Having key metrics, log data, analytics, and user interactions at hand, the team gains the ability to speed up the debugging process and minimize the average time needed for issue resolution.

Security
To protect the system from the most frequent types of cyberattacks, FivexL configured WAF allow-list and OWASP top 10 rules for WAF. Beyond these, FivexL implemented a range of security features (AWS Config, IAM Access analyzers, automated encryption, and Security Hub) and hardened containers. After that, FivexL equipped the Wings team with basic security training.

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Benefits

It might sound like a lot of work, but not getting it right or not doing it all from the beginning will cause even more work since redoing it, later on, can get very complicated and costly. This is exactly where startups have an advantage over larger companies. They have the opportunity to make the AWS right start from the outset.
The FivexL collective experience enabled setting up of a solid infrastructure foundation from scratch in just 2-3 months, compared to the typical year required by a single in-house specialist. Assuming that the specialist has a deep understanding of AWS and has experience building AWS Organisations that would scale over time. Otherwise, such setup might take even longer.

Through collaboration with FivexL, Wings benefited from a novel approach to infrastructure. This granted Wings the flexibility to manage all resources via code, enhancing the system's security, predictability, and rapid scalability. The team can now easily gather metrics, view statistics, and make updates or changes with greater convenience.

FivexL adheres to advanced industry standards and provides recorded demos explaining decision-making logic and system operation principles. This ensures a seamless transition when another professional joins the Wings team for continued system development.

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