Helping clients adopt AWS best practices in cloud architecture and design

Business Context

A prominent South African retail bank sought our expertise to unlock the full potential of the AWS cloud, aiming to harness its efficiencies and advantages. As pioneers in their cloud journey, the bank faced the challenge of establishing comprehensive standards and best practices across their organization. Driven by the escalating demands of their expanding business and the urgency to extract valuable insights from their data, their data science team was compelled to evolve swiftly. Recognizing the transformative power of AWS, they sought to leverage its capabilities to rapidly develop, deploy, and scale data-intensive solutions.

The ask for the Melio AI team was two-fold:

• To assist with performing a deep architectural design and implementation review of the first data-intensive solution that the client deployed into AWS; and
• Deploy a second use case into the AWS cloud based on an on-premises proof-of-concept (POC) that would process thousands of emails per day.

Challenge

How could the bank validate best practices were followed in deploying their first data solution to AWS

• Lack of cloud maturity with little to no reference points created uncertainty in how an existing data-intensive solution was deployed to AWS.

How could the data science team leverage cloud to prove value rapidly for a new use case

• There was a need for a scalable infrastructure to enable the new data solution.
• Future projects were dependent on the use case to prove value and return on investment for a cloud-based data solution.
• Limited cloud engineering and deployment skills within the data science team.

Solution

Harnessing the AWS Well-Architected Framework for optimal architecture

• We utilised our tailor-made FluidMaturity solution, built upon AWS Well-Architected principles, to deliver the bank with actionable recommendations and enhancements.
• This was done through a series of client workshops, AWS account inspection and completion of our automated FluidMaturity assessment.
Find out more about our proven FLUID Maturity Assessments here

Architect, integrate and deploy the email-based POC to AWS cloud

• Our multi-skilled engineering team helped the bank to design the cloud solution following AWS Well-Architected principles.
• The architecture design incorporated practical recommendations, aiming to expedite solution implementation while considering key aspects such as:
  Time efficiency: Enabling a swift deployment of the solution
  Cost optimisation: Identifying opportunities to optimise cloud costs
  Security: Ensuring robust security measures are in place
  Ease of maintenance and administration: Facilitating streamlined management by the existing data science team
  We recommended a containerisation strategy to enhance the existing solution to improve scalability and portability. We also assisted the team to decouple key services for improved flexibility and efficiency for the deployment into AWS.