Blue/Green Deployment for a Large Financial Technology Platform

Serving multiple educational organizations across the US, this market-leading digital wallet and accounts payable platform is aimed at replacing paperwork and manual processes with simple and elegant automated technology. Therefore, such a socially important mission definitely implies a robust tech foundation. In this regard, the Matoffo team met all client’s objectives by implementing fast and reliable blue/green and canary deployment strategies.

As a recognized champion of finance officers and finance teams, our client firmly believes that digitizing processes is the key to saving valuable time and focusing on critical needs instead of manual work. Managing purchasing and reimbursement processes, this one-of-a-kind company emphasizes the balancing act of getting funding into the hands of those who require it while ensuring compliance and control. Our client serves both education and state and local agencies equipping them with a nimble digital wallet technology. In recent years, the company has evolved from a small startup to an industry-leading financial technology platform dedicated to building a better future for students, teachers, families, and society as a whole.

The primary purpose of our client is to provide teachers with a simple yet powerful technology that would easily allow them to get the funds they require for their classrooms. At the same time, the company strives to destroy the burden of the purchasing and reimbursement process so their customers can concentrate on their mission of making a difference for educational organizations and the whole community.

Yet, it is impossible to fulfill such a socially significant goal without a stable technology foundation. Bearing this in mind, the client experienced a need to configure an effective deployment solution that can cover all their needs, such as deployment speed and fast (easy) rollback, to mention just a few of them.

Directed by the challenges and expectations of the client, our team decided to develop a solution based on Terraform and Jenkins pipelines. Since both these technologies integrate with a number of AWS Services, they help to ease and fasten the development process while also delivering great value to the end users.

With such a stable tech foundation, our skilled engineers can easily integrate changes to the project. What is more, thanks to reducing the time-to-market period, users can obtain a fresh build faster while also automating the infrastructure setup of a business using IaC on both cloud and on-premise.

Nothing lasts longer than choosing a trustworthy cloud development provider. With dozens of companies in the market, this challenge may turn into a real headache. Fortunately, when it comes to Matoffo, the choice is obvious. Providing state-of-the-art consultancy services, we always get to the core of the customer’s pain point in order to come up with a tailor-made solution that not only solves the existing problem but also provides the client with the ability to grow and scale their business in an easy and efficient manner. Ultimately, the incredible mesh of our long-term experience and client-focused approach always results in a high client satisfaction rate.

As our main goal was to build a high-performing solution based on Terraform and Jenkins pipelines, we implemented several crucial steps to reach this goal. First, we created an Application Load Balancer template in Terraform which allows performing blue/green and canary deployment types.

In detail, this configuration enables switching traffic between different sets of target groups using AWS ALB. Hence, we are running two separate environments, which can have various application versions. This allows the spread of traffic between different environments in a few ways. Additionally, we can release some features for a small list of customers using canary deployment.

The great advantage of having two environments is that we can run new and old versions at the same time and quickly do a rollback in case of a bad release, just switching from one environment to another. To complete this project, our team used the following tech stack: AWS ALB, AWS EC2, Terraform, and Jenkins.

Regardless of the type and complexity of the project, we always meet the client’s requirements. Throughout the whole development process, we paid attention even to the smallest details to ensure everything worked as expected (or even better). Considering all of the above, we managed to deliver value in the following aspects:

・Improved Release/Deployment Processes
Through every stage and environment involved, we utilized best industry practices to get the most out of release and deployment processes.

・Fast & Reliable Development
As a trustworthy cloud development partner, Matoffo always delivers solutions on time while ensuring the client is totally satisfied with the outcome.

・Blue/Green Deployment
Due to this deployment strategy, we could run two environments simultaneously, comparing the new and old versions.

・Quick Rollback
In case of a bad release, we guarantee a quick rollback by switching from one environment to another in a blink of an eye.

What can be better than positive reviews from our great clients? In this case, the client was totally satisfied with the solution since our fruitful cooperation resulted in fast and reliable blue/green and canary deployment. On a final note, our team will be glad to remain their trustworthy partner, so we hope plenty of exciting projects are waiting for us ahead.