Until 2018, Omise had a multi-cloud strategy in place, successfully running workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS) while experimenting with different cloud platforms to find the best fit for its technical requirements and development culture. That year, Omise decided to fully migrate to AWS because of the platform’s robust managed service offering and its integration with DevOps practices.

Reducing complexity was another motive for the migration. Since moving to the AWS Cloud, Omise’s compliance management process has become more straightforward. Omise is required to conduct annual audits for the government and banks in each country of operation, a process that is expedited with readily available documentation from the AWS Artifact repository.

“By choosing AWS as our single cloud provider, we can extend our cloud infrastructure to any country while adhering to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS),” says Frederico Araujo, the chief information security officer at Omise.

Shortly after going all-in on AWS, Omise containerized its applications with Kubernetes by taking advantage of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). Araujo says that this shift has unlocked an agile DevOps culture within his team and engineering departments. “All our developers have access to staging and production environments, so they can quickly deploy new applications as a microservice using Amazon EKS.”

Omise used to require a couple of months to launch a new product, but now engineers can take an idea from conception through testing to production in just three weeks. Time-to-market is particularly important in Japan, where Omise has many competitors that are domestic incumbents. Compared to a majority of its competitors, Omise has the advantage of modern technology with Kubernetes, which allows it to react quickly to changing market demands and provide real-time APIs.

Furthermore, because a containerized approach allows for isolated development with microservices, applications can be deployed outside the strict parameters of PCI DSS compliance, which applies to card transactions only. Araujo explains, “By using Amazon EKS, we don’t have to re-audit appliances each time we launch a product. We can use existing security certifications to get a product to market right away.”

Having a fixed IP address for Omise products also ensures new products can easily integrate with its banking partners’ systems. The company uses AWS Global Accelerator and a Network Address Translation (NAT) Gateway to provide banks with static customer-facing IPs for each of its products. “Banks have a lot of firewalls, and changes to their white list of preapproved IP addresses can take anywhere from one to three months,” Araujo explains.

Omise’s success as a FinTech is tied to its ability to guarantee high-availability systems. The enterprises it currently serves, such as Allianz and True Corporation, demand high availability even during peak processing times. Omise solutions offer 99.99% of high availability and are built to scale. By going all-in on AWS, the company has increased its maximum transaction volume tenfold, processing 10,000 transactions per minute during peak periods.

The use of Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is instrumental in maintaining Omise’s high-availability architecture. Multi-AZ database instances include cross-region replication, so even if a server goes down in Japan, servers in the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region can take over. “The best parts of Amazon RDS are the availability and automation. Managing databases is a hard job we can offload to AWS, while still maintaining the flexibility to customize and add database extensions,” says Araujo.

Pricing is another reason Omise stays loyal to AWS. The company has started using AWS Savings Plans as a flexible alternative for its viable dynamic workloads. With its broad range of products, Omise requires different Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance types to match each workload’s particular requirements. AWS Savings Plans give engineers the flexibility to use next-generation Amazon EC2 instances as soon as they are released, ensuring Omise’s technology stack is fully modernized.

“We are very confident we have a solid infrastructure with AWS and also very confident in the cost,” says Araujo. “We can better plan business expansion and have visibility into spending over the long term.”

• Maintains high availability with 99.99% uptime
• Launches new products in 3 weeks instead of 2 months
• Simplifies compliance and PCI DSS certification
• Secures workloads and ensures resilience across regions
• Controls costs while expanding
• Improves confidence with DevOps culture