Success Story
Flow takes its payments platform to a cloud-native model on AWS in 4 months, with full CI/CD and full-stack observability
At a glance
Flow is a PCI DSS-certified Chilean online payment gateway operating in Chile, Mexico and Peru. Its infrastructure had no containerization, automated CI/CD or environment separation, and deploys were manual and risky. Craftech took it to a cloud-native model on AWS, with Kubernetes, GitOps and full-stack observability. In 4 months the platform was fully operational and Flow's team was trained to run it on its own.
4 months
to have the cloud-native platform fully running on AWS
Flow is a Chilean online payment gateway operating in Chile, Mexico and Peru. It lets businesses collect payments by credit and debit card, bank transfer, payment links, subscriptions and REST API. It is PCI DSS certified and part of the Visa Global Registry. At the time of the project, it was a startup expanding regionally, with a platform of high transactional criticality.
Solution implemented
- Containerization of 7 microservices
- Amazon EKS across 3 separate AWS accounts (DEV, SHARED and PRD) with VPCs and VPC peering
- Terraform and Terragrunt for infrastructure as code, with Atlantis as the GitOps engine
- GitLab CI for build and test, and ArgoCD with automatic sync
- External Secrets Operator for credentials
- Route 53 with public and private zones, ACM, ALB, API Gateway and Amazon Cognito for API authentication, and VPN for internal access
- Amazon CloudFront for the frontends and Amazon ECR for images and Helm charts
- Observability with Prometheus and Thanos, Loki and Promtail, and Grafana
- SonarQube integrated into the pipeline
- Training and documentation: network and infrastructure diagrams, and pipeline and monitoring guides
Business Challenge
Flow's infrastructure had no containerization, no automated CI/CD and no AWS accounts separated by environment. Deploys were manual and risky, observability was limited and the infrastructure was not ready to scale or to meet the security standards of the fintech business. On top of that, the team lacked the internal capacity to modernize at this scale without disrupting operations.
Solution
Craftech took the infrastructure to a cloud-native model on AWS. It containerized the 7 microservices and deployed them on Amazon EKS, across 3 separate AWS accounts for development, shared and production, with VPCs and VPC peering. It built full CI/CD with GitLab CI for build and test, and continuous deployment with ArgoCD. All infrastructure was defined as code with Terraform and Terragrunt, with a GitOps flow in Atlantis so that infrastructure changes go through pull requests. It added External Secrets Operator for credentials; Route 53, ACM, ALB, API Gateway and Amazon Cognito for API authentication; Amazon CloudFront for the frontends; and an observability layer with Prometheus, Thanos, Loki, Promtail and Grafana, with SonarQube integrated into the pipeline. It wrapped up with training and complete documentation so the team could operate on its own.
Outcomes
- Cloud-native platform fully operational on AWS in 4 months
- From manual deploys to automated continuous delivery, with every service in containers on Kubernetes managed with GitOps
- Full visibility into the system: centralized metrics, logs and dashboards
- Lower operational risk thanks to environment separation and infrastructure as code
- Flow's team trained and documented to operate on its own
Stack & technologies
