Case Studies

About

This financial services organization provides financial planning, advice, and educational resources that investors need in a timely manner - including retirement planning, wealth preservation, brokerage services, and more. The organization services customers worldwide to help them realize their financial goals.

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Business Challenge

The data ingestion process of a well-known financial services organization was not designed to scale to handle peak and projected future volume levels. Failures in that process could directly impact their ability to provide accurate and timely analysis, reporting, and investment advice.

Were that to happen, the ensuing reduction in assets under management and future opportunity loss would easily total tens of millions of dollars. Additionally, the data came from multiple sources in multiple formats and the whole system was governed by FINRA compliance regulations, including data encryption. 

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Technical Challenge

The organization needed an event-driven data processing solution that securely ingests, prepares, analyzes, and scales during peak and projected volume levels. This solution needed to handle data from multiple data sources in multiple formats, be cost-effective, and meet their FINRA compliance regulations. This solution would also allow the organization to have access to timely analysis and reporting with a comprehensive visualization of the data.

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AWS Services Adopted for this Solution

• Amazon EventBridge, for data requests
• AWS Lambda, for file validation
• AWS Glue, for ETL
• Amazon Athena, for queries
• Amazon QuickSight, for data visualization
• Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon SNS for monitoring and alerts

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Event-Driven Architecture Solution for Financial Services Firm

Cloudtech implemented an event-driven solution anchored by Amazon EventBridge, AWS Lambda, and AWS Glue. During non-working hours, Amazon EventBridge triggers Lambda to request new data and store it in Amazon S3. AWS Lambda also performs file validation before moving on to a AWS Glue Crawler and then AWS Glue Job for ETL to an AWS Glue Catalog, where the data is queried using Amazon Athena and visualized using Amazon QuickSight. Monitoring and alerting are handled throughout the process flow using Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon SNS. The result not only enhances scalability and accuracy, but also enables cost savings.

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“Cloudtech's event-driven architecture solution is the backbone of our timely and accurate investment advice that our clients rely on.” 
- VP of Engineering, Financial Services

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Event-Driven Architecture Results

Cloudtech provided the organization with an event-driven data processing solution which was secure, scalable, and handled multiple data sources and data formats. In addition, the solution provided timely analysis, reporting and a comprehensive view which allowed the organization to provide accurate investment advice to their clients. In turn, this solution helped the organization avoid the potential future opportunity losses which could have cost them tens of millions of dollars.

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Increase Your Data Security

Learn how you can realize the benefits of an event-driven architecture for your financial services data, to improve security, analysis, and customer experience. Contact Cloudtech today.

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Executive Summary

Enklu aims to provide an Augmented Reality (AR) runtime for UWP, WebGL, Windows Standalone, Android, and iOS. It carves a niche in the market by providing a product that is highly iterative in that it provides instant feedback to users for changes in layout, assets UI or scripts by automatically downloading new data eliminating the need to rebuild. Enklu is truly cross platform, not only does it compile flawlessly to multiple targets, it also allows for tailoring experiences to multiple platforms. Enklu employs Unity along with a C# and Node.js framework for backend to provide a web app that can help content creators create an AR VR experience. It employs React for its frontend.

Problem Statement

Most of the tech stack was deployed on azure VMs. However, they were using archaic deployment processes with a lot of manual input, coupled with poor infra planning had resulted in a high amount of downtime.
This problem was brought into sharp relief when their user base climbed tenfold. The problem was further compounded by a lack of health checks and resource monitoring. Subpar patches to this had brought the core maintenance and enhancement operations to a screeching halt.

Our Solutions

1) The first thing that we proposed to do was to move the frontend build files to S3 in order to reduce the load on the server, post which we moved on to automating the build and deployment of docker images using git actions and terraform and setting up better resource checks by employing the built-in azure triggers.
2) Next, we proposed rewriting parts of code to better handle errors and setting up node clusters with a load balancer to help reduce the load on the primary unity servers, this also helped with reducing downtime since nodes could be safely brought down without affecting the user experience during low traffic hours.

Technologies

C#, Nodejs, AWS(SQS, S3), Azure(VM and load balancer), Unity, .Net, Docker

Success Metrics

1. Reduced down time
2. Better error alerts
3. Reduced first response time (FRT) for resource hiccups

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About

A global IT staffing company that serves customers in every major vertical from startups to Fortune 100 companies, was looking to modernize their business operations so they could more reliably make data-driven business decisions.

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Business Challenge

The IT staffing company initially built a dual-purpose system that functioned as both a customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning tool. While custom-built for their own specifications, the existing system created some unique business challenges - specifically in the log analytics portion of the tool built on Elasticsearch.

The first challenge was price; between the Elastic licensing fees and the cost of labor associated with upkeep and maintenance, it was not a cost-effective solution. Next was reliability; the system was prone to frequent downtime and performance issues. Add to that, the business disruptions caused both internally and externally, signaled that the customer was ready for a change.

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Technical Challenge

Cloudtech analyzed their data infrastructure, and determined that the current solution - self-managed ELK stack - to be suboptimal compared to the licensing fee costs. Also, the solution required eight engineers to maintain and troubleshoot.

In addition, data streams were vulnerable to disruption, and lack of shard availability and rebalancing issues caused frequent search throughput breakdowns. Lastly, upgrading the solution was tedious and time-consuming, taking up to a month in some cases.

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Log Analytics Solutions

Based on the challenges, Cloudtech proposed a centralized logging platform using Amazon OpenSearch Service, AWS Fargate, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). This platform provided the customer with the scalability and data integrity required to store and analyze logs generated by their CRM/ERP tool. Given that cost and maintenance were important issues to address, Amazon OpenSearch Service was chosen for its speed, price, and security. Additionally, as a managed service, it alleviated the maintenance overhead associated with the previous solution.

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“The cost savings and downtime reductions we experienced were far above anything we expected, and have since significantly impacted our business in a positive way. The insights we get from reliable log analytics are driving our business forward.”
- CTO, IT Staffing Company

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Log Analytics Solution Results

Cloudtech’s solution enabled the customer to centralize their logs, process logs in real-time, gain insights, and make data-driven decisions. Amazon OpenSearch Service made it easier to perform search operations, enhance search efficiency, and provide scalable searching. In fact, the ability to scale up and down in minutes improves search throughput. In addition, OpenSearch Service allows the customer to schedule service software and auto-tune updates during off-peak hours, helping to better plan their deployments. Most importantly, the customer realized 40% cost reduction and 80% reduction in downtime.

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Reduce Costs with Log Analytics Solution

Implement your own data processing and log analytics solution, and realize the business benefits of reduced downtime, optimized costs, and improved business decisions. Contact Cloudtech today.

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About bNoteable

bNoteable helps you showcase your hard work on a path to reach your goals by leveraging your band, orchestra, or vocal experience to its fullest potential to college admissions boards.
This begins early by setting a course that allows you to turn those hours of fun and friendship into leadership experience, hours of practice and performances into scholarship potential, and years of music classes into overall higher SATs and GPA scores, and academic achievement.

Executive Summary

Continuing the development of a musician networking platform which involved implementing new features, enhancing the existing ones, and fixing bugs/errors/issues in the platform by improving its efficiency and productivity along with making the platform responsive.

Problem Statement

Our client wanted us to design and create a social platform where each and every user is able to connect and interact with one another easily. He came to us after a bad experience with some other company and was expecting to continue the development by improving website performance as well as efficiency.
The platform had various bugs which needed to be fixed and some major features were to be added like payment service, OTP service, adding more security along with improving existing features. Performance of platform was being affected as there were some major issues like:
1. Deployment architecture- Everything was deployed on a single EC2 instance due to which there was a high amount of downtime. The performance was impacted more when the user base was increased.
2. The videos on his platform were taking a lot of time to load.

Our Solutions

1) We followed MVC architecture for developing REST API using express as middleware and mongoose for managing data in MongoDB. Authenticated API with jwt by using JSON web token package.
2) Added payment service in the platform by integrating stripe payment gateway with help of stripe package, created OTPs for security/validation which was communicated via SMS with help of Twilio.
3) To improve the performance, we deployed the backend on a separate ec2 instance with Nginx as reverse proxy and pm2 as process manager which comes with a built-in load balancer and helps to keep the application alive forever.
4) Installed Nginx on the server, and changed the Nginx.conf file configurations as per the requirement and it worked as a load balancing solution. Also replaced the lets encrypt SSL certificates with ACM(AWS Certificate Manager) to make certificate renewal, provision, and management process better as well as easy.
5) For adding new features to the platform, the frontend involved creating several components, services, directives, pipes, and modules in Angular.
6) To reduce the load time we implemented Lazy loading with help of Lazy load routes. The reason behind increased load time for videos was the use of video tag over secured protocol, to solve this we used iframe for rendering videos which proved to be much faster.
7) Changed the existing deployment architecture and moved the front-end to S3 so that load on the server can be reduced. We moved the front-end to S3 with CloudFront as CDN for speeding up the distribution of web content and improving performance.

Technologies

Angular 10, Node, Express, MongoDB, AWS S3, EC2, CloudFront

Success Metrics

1. Provided all the deliverables within the expected deadlines, improved performance as down time reduced and videos were no longer buffering for a long time.
2. Met all the expectations of the client and with positive feedback. All his meetings with directors and students were successful due to which he wanted us to implement some more new features on his platform.
3. Continuous reporting of progress to the client.

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