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Welcome to Silicon Overdrive!

Karripay — AWS Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR)

About the Customer

Karripay (Karri) offers a secure, efficient, and user friendly payment solution for educational institutions and community organizations. By partnering with Karri, thousands of schools and community groups have simplified their fund collection processes, eliminating the need to transport large sums of cash. Instead, the Karri app provides a secure and traceable online platform for virtual transactions.

This innovation has significantly enhanced safety in schools and communities nationwide, as Karri is the only application of its kind with the backing of Nedbank, a reputable financial institution.

Available on both the Apple and Google App Stores, the Karri app offers valuable features for educators, including the ability to add agreements, indemnity forms, permission slips, and student waivers. It also streamlines the payment process for textbooks, stationery, and special events.

Parents also benefit from the app, with options to make partial or mandatory payments and receive alerts for overdue funds.

The Challenge

As a payment solutions provider in a competitive industry, Karri needed to ensure that their cloud infrastructure was compliant with current Well Architected Framework design principles and best practices and identify any areas that might require improvement.

Karri contacted Silicon Overdrive, an Amazon Web Services Advanced Partner, to conduct an AWS Well Architected Framework Review (WAFR) of their AWS infrastructure.

Silicon Overdrive recommended a migration to a new, best-practice environment to minimize the disruption to their services.

This highlighted a need to align and consolidate Karri’s existing applications and infrastructure to a best practice deployment using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). To this effect, Silicon Overdrive deployed Terraform scripts within a single AWS Cloud provider. 

The Karri management team, eager to enhance their operational efficiency, seized every available opportunity. As part of this commitment, they recognized the need to establish a seamless recovery system for their applications hosted on AWS, ensuring business continuity. 

The Solution

Silicon Overdrive team conducted a comprehensive assessment, aligning with the AWS Well Architected Framework Review’s six key pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability. This evaluation pinpointed areas needing enhancement to adhere to cloud best practices.

To address these needs, Silicon Overdrive introduced Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service. This solution simplified the deployment, administration, and scaling of containerized applications.

The Karri app was seamlessly integrated with the AWS environment, providing a user-friendly platform for running container workloads with advanced security features, courtesy of Amazon ECS Anywhere.

Furthermore, AWS Fargate, a serverless compute solution for containers, was implemented. This serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine allowed Karri to concentrate on application development without the burden of server management. This removed the operational overhead of scaling, patching, securing, and managing servers. 

The Outcome

Adopting the AWS Well Architected Framework empowered Karri to align with AWS architectural best practices, fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement.

As a result of the assessment, the Karri app gained the capability to consistently evaluate its architecture against industry standards, bolstering governance, security, compliance, and scalability.

A significant focus for the Karri team revolved around enhancing their proficiency with AWS. They aimed to translate the lessons learned from this project into applying AWS’s best practices in future deployments and operational endeavors.

Automating Karri’s existing infrastructure using Terraform introduced reliability and a seamless recovery process. Manual infrastructure handling became a thing of the past, replaced by Infrastructure as Code (IaC), enabling dependable and auditable environment changes.

The implementation of AWS Services, namely Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate, optimized operations for Karri. These solutions facilitated deployment with zero downtime through automated pipelines. The consolidation into AWS services enhanced control, provided more profound insights into platform performance, and revealed predictable patterns.

Karri gained the ability to launch containers on AWS at scale without any concerns about the underlying infrastructure. Automation brought opportunities for cost reduction through automatic scaling and pay-as-you-go pricing. This allowed for faster deployment and bolstered confidence in security, compliance, and architecture alignment with regulatory standards.

Karri fully embraced the AWS Well Architected Framework Review process, positively impacting technical governance. Quicker decisions became possible in an environment rich with products and services.

The business now manages its operations more efficiently and continuously improves internal scores and goals. The Karri team operates with peace of mind, diligently tracking progress towards objectives while ensuring compliance with industry standards such as PASA and PCI DSS.

By embracing AWS Shared Responsibility, security, and compliance were significantly improved. Adopting enhanced security practices kept the technical team informed of the latest trends and empowered proactive measures based on internal scan reports, recognized as a significant value addition.

Karri’s Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) tightened considerably, enhancing performance efficiency. Automation replaced numerous manual deployments with automated pipelines, improving the reliable delivery of changes to the running platform.

Deployments and monitoring were simplified, reducing complexities to the click of a button. AWS tools like CloudWatch facilitated resource and application data analysis through powerful visualization.

Using CloudWatch, the company adeptly implemented cost saving measures in response to alerts that signalled deviations from their target cost thresholds.

Werner van der Vyver, Chief Technology Officer at Karri, said, “The Silicon Overdrive team was immensely helpful and accommodating in the AWS WARF journey, they were deeply knowledgeable about AWS. A partnership was formed to assist Karri in achieving AWS best practices. Silicon Overdrive listened to all our issues and spent time understanding our workloads so that we could end up with the best possible outcome for our platform instead of a cookie cutter approach that might not have fitted our workloads effectively.” [sic]

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