OPPORTUNITY
A Fortune 500 customer within the financial services industry faced increasing mainframe costs as well as slow response times for customers. One of the largest compute loads on the customer’s mainframe was calculating the current value of a participant’s 401(k) balance. During peak traffic times on their website, this calculation wasn’t able to scale and meet traffic demands.
SOLUTION
The participants’ data lives within a DB2 database on the mainframe. Therefore the calculation of current value needs to be able to connect to that database. A Spring-based API was created and deployed to Fargate as a service. This service was also set up with autoscalling to deal with heavy traffic loads. Finally, a DynamoDB table was used to store cached values.
The solution also needs to be resilient in the case of a large outage. Because of this, the solution was deployed in two regions and utilized Amazon Route 53 health checks for routing traffic. They also made use of DynamoDB global tables in order to keep data in sync between the regions.
RESULTS AND IMPACT
By implementing this solution the financial services company was able to reduce compute costs on the mainframe and provide some headway for future growth without additional costs. By taking advantage of ECS Fargate, the organization was able to scale their solution up and down based on demand, providing significant savings.