Industry

Financial Services Provider

Technology

AWS

F88’s Journey to a Secure and Centralized Data Management with AWS Cloud Solutions

Established in 2013, F88 stands as the forerunner network of secure lending in Vietnam, focusing on serving micro & small enterprises as well as individual customers. Receiving substantial financial support from renowned global investment funds like Mekong Capital and Granite Oak, F88 serves as a dependable destination for customers to access super quick – super easy – super awesome finance via its extensive network of branches across the country, catering to every borrowing need. In 2023, F88 is aiming to become the number 1 financial service provider in Vietnam with 1,000 transaction offices in 63 major cities and provinces nationwide.

INDUSTRY:

Financial Services Provider

TECHNOLOGY:

AWS

CUSTOMER CHALLENGE

F88 used to have multiple, scattered databases, both on premise and on AWS Clouds. As a prominent financial service provider with an extensive customer pool, F88 faced many challenges due to this dispersed collection of databases, including data inconsistency, data security, and data synchronization.

First and foremost, the discrepancies in data between different branches or environments could potentially lead to confusion and errors in financial transactions and reporting. On the other hand, handling sensitive financial information requires stringent security measures. However, F88’s previous architecture made securing data across various databases a daunting task, which carried greater risk of data breach. Similarly, keeping data synchronized between on-premises and cloud databases was another challenging task that F88 needed to do because changes made in one location might not immediately reflect in the other, leading to discrepancies in customer records, balances, and transaction histories.

SOLUTION – RENOVA CLOUD APPROACH

The F88 project focused on building data warehouses for generation BI reports. After a thorough comprehensive analysis of the client’s requirements, Renova Cloud designed and deployed the solution for F88 based on a series of carefully selected managed AWS services including Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon MWAA, and other serverless services such as AWS Lambda, AWS Glue, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon SNS.

Figure 1: Overall architecture of F88 solution

Beside helping F88 to overcome the three above-mentioned challenges, selected AWS services were also meant to increase the overall resilience of the client’s IT architecture. With AWS S3, data storage could achieve heightened durability and availability, thanks to redundancy across availability zones. Meanwhile, AWS Glue’s serverless framework and monitoring prowess contributed to unceasing data processing, effectively countering disruptions and bolstering the solution’s overall fault-tolerance ability.

Renova’s approach towards solution deployment always started with rigorous testing to confirm deployment readiness. For all the existing tables to be placed in the data pipeline and launched onto the production environment, they were tested in the three stages: Data ingestion, Data transformation, and Data loading. This process would also be applied in the case of adding new tables into the data pipeline to ensure data integrity.

To help the F88 team handle operational failures, Renova included the notification mechanism when designing the full data pipeline with MWAA as the orchestrator. Thanks to this, in the event of operational failure (out of memory, unavailable cluster, etc.) or faulty code logic, standard application logs that capture errors will be automatically exported to aid the client team during troubleshooting. On the other hand, in case of failure, Data Warehouse would turn to the most recent snapshot while Amazon Redshift would replicate data across multiple nodes. This mechanism helped ensure data loss prevention.

BENEFITS

  • With AWS Data Warehouse, F88 now has a centralized place for data, which will be the single source of truth for the whole organization.
  • AWS Data Warehouse serves as a reliable source for all of BI reports, which enable F88 to make informed, strategic business decisions
  • Most of the components that constituted the F88 solution were serverless so they incurred insignificant weight on management or operation. By the same token, F88 only needed to pay for what they used so cost optimization was ensured.
  • Renova also undertook a careful examination of the proposed architecture before the right sizing for AWS Glue, AWS Lambda, and AWS MWAA was chosen to ensure that there existed no unnecessary charge.