Success Stories / Infrastructure & DevOps Services for Fintech Product

Infrastructure & DevOps Services for Fintech Product

A fast-growing fintech that helps schools manage tuition and campus payments was struggling with slow, error-prone manual deployments.

DevOps AutomationFinTechTerraform

15 min read

2025

Executive Summary

A fast-growing fintech that helps schools manage tuition and campus payments was struggling with slow, error-prone manual deployments. After Matoffo introduced an AWS-based DevOps pipeline – combining infrastructure as code, container orchestration, blue–green CI/CD, and centralised monitoring – the company cut release time by roughly 85 percent (from two hours to under twenty minutes), reduced deployment errors by 60 percent, lowered cloud spend by 18 percent, sustained 99.9 percent uptime, and now saves about $15 000 annually in staff effort and avoided outages, freeing teams to deliver new features and onboard schools faster.

Client Background

The client is a niche fintech provider focused exclusively on the education sector. Its cloud-based platform gives K-12 schools, colleges, and training institutes a unified hub for tuition collection, grant disbursements, meal-plan top-ups, and everyday campus purchases. By replacing cash handling and paper invoices with digital wallets and real-time spend analytics, the company helps finance teams cut transaction fees, enforce policy compliance, and eliminate the administrative overhead that typically burdens educational institutions. Rapid adoption – driven by both cost savings and the growing demand for contactless payments – has seen the platform expand to hundreds of campuses in just a few years, pushing the development team to scale its infrastructure and release cadence at start-up speed.

Customer Challenge

As the client scaled its operations to meet the growing demands of educational institutions, it began to experience significant strain on its release and deployment workflows. The platform’s success brought an increase in new feature requests and onboarding requirements, but the underlying infrastructure and processes had not kept pace. Manual deployments, inconsistent environments, and lack of automation created a fragile release cycle – introducing delays, deployment failures, and escalating operational overhead.

Key Business Challenges:

High Deployment Overhead:

Releasing updates required multiple manual steps, often taking up to two hours per environment and requiring after-hours developer involvement.

Inconsistent Environments:

Infrastructure and configurations were manually replicated across staging and production, resulting in environment drift and unexpected failures during rollout.

Error-Prone Releases:

Without automated testing and validation, issues were frequently discovered post-deployment, increasing the risk of downtime during critical school payment periods.

Scalability Bottlenecks:

As more schools joined the platform, the engineering team struggled to maintain service quality without significantly increasing headcount or slowing delivery.

These issues not only impacted internal efficiency but also threatened the company’s ability to deliver a stable, responsive experience to schools relying on the platform for daily financial operations.

Goals and Requirements

In response to the inefficiencies and limitations caused by manual deployments – such as lengthy release cycles, configuration inconsistencies, frequent rollback issues, and lack of visibility – the client set out to achieve clear, results-oriented goals. These objectives were aimed at transforming their infrastructure and release operations into a faster, more reliable, and scalable system, while maintaining strong operational and compliance standards.

Performance Targets

Reduce Release Time:
Cut deployment duration from multiple hours to under 20 minutes by automating infrastructure provisioning and application delivery.
Increase Deployment Accuracy:
Minimize environment-specific failures and misconfigurations by standardizing deployment workflows through infrastructure as code.
Boost Developer Efficiency:
Engineers can be enabled to release changes independently, without DevOps bottlenecks, by implementing CI/CD pipelines with automated testing and validation.

Financial Targets

Lower Operational Costs:
Reduce time spent on manual deployment tasks and post-release incident handling – targeting annual savings in the range of $20,000.
Optimize Cloud Usage:
Improve infrastructure efficiency by introducing autoscaling, right-sizing, and resource lifecycle policies to lower monthly cloud expenses.

Scalability & Reliability

Enable Growth at Scale:
Create a deployment model that supports onboarding new school clients and features without increasing operational workload.
Ensure Configuration Consistency:
Eliminate environment drift by applying version-controlled infrastructure definitions across dev, staging, and production.
Improve Audit Readiness:
Automatically log deployment activities and enforce policy checks to support security and compliance reviews with minimal manual effort.

By setting these goals, the client aimed to build a robust DevOps foundation that would not only resolve their immediate pain points but also support long-term platform growth and operational resilience.

The Solution

To address the deployment inefficiencies and infrastructure limitations, Matoffo executed a phased implementation strategy designed to automate, standardize, and scale the client’s release processes. The solution integrated DevOps best practices, Infrastructure as Code, and continuous delivery principles – laying the foundation for a resilient and scalable education-fintech platform.

1
Infrastructure Provisioning
The first phase focused on establishing a reliable cloud foundation. All core infrastructure components were defined using Terraform and stored in a version-controlled GitHub repository. This included network configuration, compute environments, container orchestration, and supporting data services. Terraform state files were stored in Amazon S3 to enable consistent access from both local and CI environments.
2
CI/CD Environment Setup
Next, Matoffo designed and deployed a Jenkins-based CI/CD pipeline to automate the build, test, and deployment lifecycle. The pipeline was configured to run static code analysis, linting, and quality scans. Secure secrets management was implemented to ensure safe and traceable deployments.
3
Application Containerization and Deployment Automation
All microservices were containerized and deployed to AWS-managed infrastructure. The Jenkins pipeline built Docker images, pushed them to a container registry, and deployed them to the cloud environment using Terraform. Deployment triggers were automated based on source code changes, ensuring each update followed a consistent and auditable path to production.
4
Orchestration and Load Management
Deployed services were orchestrated across multiple availability zones to support fault tolerance and scaling. Load balancing and traffic management were integrated into the stack to ensure smooth routing of user requests. This enabled blue/green and rolling deployment strategies with minimal disruption to end users.
5
Observability and Feedback Loops
Finally, Matoffo configured centralized monitoring and logging to provide real-time visibility into system health and deployment outcomes. This ensured that every release was verifiable, auditable, and performance-optimized—completing the loop between development, deployment, and operational feedback.

Results and Impact

The implementation of an automated, cloud-native DevOps infrastructure delivered immediate operational and financial improvements. By streamlining the deployment lifecycle and standardizing infrastructure, the client achieved faster delivery, reduced risk, and a scalable foundation for continued growth.

Quantitative Outcomes

85% reduction in deployment time, bringing release cycles down from two hours to under 20 minutes.
≈ $15,000 annual savings through reduced manual effort, fewer errors, and faster incident recovery.
18% reduction in cloud costs, enabled by resource right-sizing and autoscaling.
99.9% uptime consistently maintained across all production environments.

Qualitative Outcomes

Greater developer efficiency, with engineers spending less time on deployment tasks and more time on feature delivery.
Improved release reliability, thanks to automated testing, consistent infrastructure, and rollback safety.
Increased agility, allowing the team to respond faster to customer needs and onboarding new schools without growing the DevOps footprint.
Higher confidence in compliance, supported by auditable pipelines and consistent policy enforcement across environments.

Key Learnings

The success of this implementation was rooted not just in the choice of tools, but in the disciplined application of DevOps principles and close collaboration between teams. Several key factors emerged as critical to the project’s outcome and offer a blueprint for similar transformation efforts:

Infrastructure as Code Enables Repeatability
By defining infrastructure through Terraform and storing it in version control, the team eliminated configuration drift, ensured environment consistency, and simplified onboarding and auditing processes.
Automation Reduces Risk and Frees Time
Automating builds, tests, and deployments minimized manual intervention, reduced human error, and freed engineers to focus on product development rather than release operations.
Observability Drives Confidence
Integrated monitoring and logging across environments provided clear visibility into deployment outcomes and system health – enabling rapid feedback, early issue detection, and more confident releases.

Next Steps

With a solid DevOps framework in place, the client is well-positioned to expand its capabilities and continue evolving its platform in line with user growth and product innovation. The following next steps are planned to maximize the long-term value of the implementation:

1
Expand Environment Coverage
Extend the CI/CD pipeline to cover additional environments such as staging, QA, and UAT, ensuring end-to-end consistency and reducing release friction across the entire lifecycle.
2
Strengthen Security Posture
Integrate security scanning, infrastructure compliance checks, and secrets rotation directly into the CI/CD process to improve DevSecOps maturity.
3
Leverage Data for Optimization
Utilize deployment and monitoring data to continuously tune performance, anticipate scaling needs, and identify areas for further automation or cost optimization.

These next steps are designed to evolve the platform from a stable release pipeline into a high-performance, self-sustaining DevOps ecosystem that scales as the business grows.

Conclusion

The implementation of an automated DevOps infrastructure marked a pivotal milestone in the client’s evolution from a fast-moving startup to a scalable, service-driven fintech platform. By streamlining deployments, standardizing environments, and eliminating manual release friction, the engineering team gained the speed and confidence to support a growing user base without increasing operational burden.

More than just a technical upgrade, this transformation empowered the client to deliver value faster, respond to customer needs more effectively, and scale operations with clarity and control. With a resilient DevOps foundation now in place, the organization is equipped not only to handle current demand but to embrace future growth, innovation, and expansion across the education sector.

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