Enabling Financial-Grade Platforms through
Strategic Cloud Modernisation
About the Client
SupportSages partnered with a leading product-based development company, building and maintaining platforms for banking and financial clients, to deliver DevOps as a Service (DaaS). Through strategic cloud modernisation, Kubernetes optimisation, and end-to-end automation, the organisation achieved a 70% reduction in infrastructure costs while meeting strict financial-grade security and compliance requirements.
The Challenges
The client struggled with performance slowdowns and security gaps as their RAG chatbot scaled across multiple platforms.
Their existing GCP setup couldn t efficiently handle 500+ concurrent users, leading to latency and reliability issues.
Escalating Cloud Costs
Multiple client environments (Dev, UAT, Production) running on non-optimised infrastructure led to high operational spend.
Strict Security & Compliance Expectations
Financial clients required continuous PCI DSS compliance, regular audits, and strong security controls
Limited Deployment Agility
Multiple client environments (Dev, UAT, Production) running on non-optimised infrastructure led to high operational spend.
Scalability Constraints
High-volume transactional data and Kubernetes workloads demanded better resource management.
SupportSages’ Solution
SupportSages delivered a fully managed DevOps operating model, enabling the development company to meet enterprise financial standards while controlling cost and complexity.
Kubernetes Modernisation & Cost Optimisation
- Migrated workloads from Amazon ECS to Amazon EKS, enabling improved scalability and standardisation. Monitoring and alert response.
- Performed deep Kubernetes pod resource analysis, reducing CPU and memory requests
- Optimised node sizing and node count, significantly lowering cluster infrastructure costs.
- Selectively migrated Kubernetes environments from AWS to OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) for non production and specific workloads to further reduce Kubernetes operating costs.
CI/CD Transformation with Governance
- Replaced AWS CodePipeline entirely with Jenkins, offering greater control and reduced tooling costs.
- Implemented GitOps-based deployments using ArgoCD, ensuring environment consistency and auditability.
- Introduced Jira-driven deployment workflows:
- Distinct approval processes for Development, UAT, and Production
- Full traceability of changes for financial-grade governance
- Enforced manual approval gates for production deployments.
- Integrated SonarQube static code analysis to maintain code quality and security standards.
Open Source Observability & Monitoring Stack
To support multiple client environments cost-effectively, SupportSages designed a scalable open-source monitoring platform:
- Fluent Bit logging for Kubernetes, replacing CloudWatch to significantly reduce log ingestion costs
- ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) for centralised log analysis
- Prometheus & Grafana for performance and metrics monitoring
- Wazuh for security monitoring and compliance visibility
- Zabbix and Uptime monitoring for infrastructure availability
- ClamAV for malware detection
Security-First Architecture for Financial Workloads
- Implemented Cloudflare WAF for DDoS protection and application-layer security.
- Enabled continuous threat detection using:
- AWS GuardDuty
- AWS Inspector
- Wazuh SIEM
- Enforced manual approval gates for production deployments.
Data & Storage Cost Optimisation
To support multiple client environments cost-effectively, SupportSages designed a scalable open-source monitoring platform:
- Migrated high-volume MS SQL developer workloads from Amazon RDS to a dedicated database server, reducing costs while maintaining performance
- Converted all EC2 EBS volumes from gp2 to gp3, improving performance at a lower cost.
- Centralised backup strategy:
- All AMI backups stored in Amazon S3
- Long-term retention moved to S3 Glacier
- Applied CloudWatch log retention policies to eliminate unnecessary storage overhead.onverted all EC2 EBS volumes from gp2 to gp3, improving performance at a lower cost.
- Implemented Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering for efficient data lifecycle management.
Continuous PCI DSS Compliance Enablement
As part of DevOps as a Service, SupportSages helped the development company maintain continuous PCI DSS readiness for its financial clients:
- Quarterly PCI DSS audits and remediation cycles
- Proactive vulnera bility fixes and configuration hardening
- Annual PC I DSS certification renewal, including:
- Documentation preparation
- Evidence collection
- Audit support
- Compliance controls integrated directly into CI/CD and infrastructure workflows
Business Impact!
70% Reduction in Cloud Infrastructure Costs
Achieved through Kubernetes optimisation, open-source tooling, cloud migration strategies, and storage optimisation.
Financial-Grade Reliability
Automated health checks, instant rollbacks, and GitOps deployments ensure stable releases for banking clients.
Stronger Security & Compliance Posture
Continuous monitoring and audit-ready processes reduced regulatory risk.
Operational Excellence at Scale
Jira-driven deployments and DevOps governance enabled faster delivery across multiple financial customer environments
This engagement enabled a development company to deliver secure, compliant, and cost efficient platforms for the banking and financial sector, without being burdened by infrastructure complexity.
By adopting DevOps as a Service from SupportSages, the organisation transformed its cloud operations into a scalable, audit ready, and cost optimised foundation allowing engineering teams to focus on building high value financial products.
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