Welcome to Silicon Overdrive!
Oye Platform Solutions Limited operates Songa Na Oye, a digital lending and insurance platform serving boda boda (motorcycle taxi) operators across East Africa. The platform provides fuel loans and personal accident insurance, giving informal-sector transport operators access to financial products that support their day-to-day livelihoods.
Committed to expanding access to financial services for underserved operators, Oye continues to invest in the technology underpinning Songa Na Oye, ensuring the platform can scale reliably as its user base and product range grow.
Oye operated microservices architecture on Microsoft Azure, using Azure Container Apps for its backend, Azure Static Web Apps for its frontend, and PostgreSQL Flexible Server across multiple tenant databases. The environment had no functional issues, but as Oye planned its next phase of growth, the company wanted greater scalability, stronger resilience, and priority access to technical support than its existing setup could offer.
This made the project a competitive cloud migration rather than a reactive fix: a considered, proactive move to Amazon Web Services (AWS), made from a position of stability rather than urgency. Oye’s application was originally scoped for migration to the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region. Ahead of go-live, however, AWS reported service disruptions affecting that region, introducing an unplanned complication just before cutover of a live, revenue-generating platform.
Silicon Overdrive architected and built a new AWS best-practice environment, covering both Staging and Production and migrated Oye’s application onto it. Key elements of the solution included:
Compute: Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate was used for serverless, scalable container orchestration, removing the operational overhead of managing servers directly.
Database: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL (engine 17.x) was deployed as the primary database, with native PostgreSQL replication used to migrate data safely from Azure into AWS.
CI/CD: GitHub Actions workflows were extended with OIDC federation, giving each ECS service its own scoped IAM role for short-lived, keyless deployment authentication.
Infrastructure as Code: Terraform was used to build the environment as a redeployable package across reusable modules, delivered to Oye as a project artifact.
Networking and delivery: Amazon Route 53 handled domains, Amazon CloudFront handled content delivery, and AWS Certificate Manager issued SSL/TLS certificates, with HTTPS enforced on both the ALB and CloudFront.
Container registry: Amazon ECR was configured with per-service repositories, access control, and image tagging.
Security: AWS WAF was deployed with six AWS-managed rule groups, including the Common Rule Set, Known Bad Inputs, Amazon IP Reputation List, Linux, Unix, and SQL injection rule sets, protecting both CloudFront and the public ALB. Amazon GuardDuty was enabled across S3, EBS malware protection, and ECS Fargate runtime monitoring. AWS Config was enabled with conformance packs covering IAM, S3, and security-services best practices, validated using Trend Vision One™ Container Security and Cyber/Cloud Risk Exposure Management (CREM).
Resilience: AWS Backup was implemented with daily, weekly, and monthly backup plans, a dedicated backup vault, and 30-day RDS backup retention. Database restore was carried out by Oye’s own technical team using an external tool, with Silicon Overdrive providing advisory support.
Because the entire environment had been built in Terraform as reusable, redeployable modules, Silicon Overdrive was able to stand up equivalent Production and Staging environments in the AWS Europe (Ireland) Region ahead of the planned cutover, directly in response to the AWS-reported regional disruption in Bahrain with no impact to Oye’s migration timeline or live services. The original Bahrain-region resources could not be decommissioned via Terraform at the time, since the same regional outage that prompted the move also affected control-plane access to that region; infrastructure teardown was deferred to Oye’s team until AWS access to the region was restored, while cutover to the new environment proceeded independently and without delay.
Following the initial migration, Oye requested a USSD access channel for Songa Na Oye. Silicon Overdrive integrated a new USSD-API ECS service with Oye’s existing ECS APIs, including a dedicated ECR repository, IAM roles and policies, a private ECS service, and updated Application Load Balancer routing to allow Oye to route traffic to the USSD-API container.
Staging and Production environments were successfully deployed and handed over in the AWS Europe (Ireland) Region, validated against the business success metrics defined at the outset of the project: the web application was accessible via its DNS entry through CloudFront; web and application servers could access EFS; web servers could communicate securely with the application servers’ internal load balancer; application servers could communicate securely with the database hosted on RDS; and external integration points remained accessible from the web and application servers.
The environment also achieved a score of 95% on the Trend Vision One Cyber/Cloud Risk Exposure Management GDPR compliance report, meeting the project’s defined 95%-or-higher business success metric for all environments containing production and sensitive data. More broadly, Trend Vision One™ validation scores of 95–97% were achieved across the AWS Well-Architected Framework, NIST Cybersecurity Framework, ISO 27001:2022, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GDPR.
AWS’s serverless container platform gave Oye’s compute layer the ability to auto-scale with real demand rather than being provisioned for fixed peak capacity, reducing infrastructure cost relative to the prior approach. The move to short-lived, OIDC-based CI/CD authentication removed long-lived access keys as a standing security liability.
Perhaps most notably, the Terraform-based build proved its value directly during the project itself: when the originally scoped AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region experienced an AWS-reported service disruption, Silicon Overdrive redeployed the entire environment to the AWS Europe (Ireland) Region ahead of go-live, using the same infrastructure modules, with no rework and no impact to Oye’s live services or timeline.
Luke Tendayi, CTO, Oye Platform Solutions Limited said, “Working with Silicon Overdrive was an exceptional experience. As a team without a dedicated AWS engineer, we were initially navigating unfamiliar territory, but the Silicon Overdrive team showed incredible patience, professionalism, and hands-on support throughout the migration. They took the time to explain the architecture clearly and walked us through the complexities, ensuring we truly understood the setup. Thanks to their guidance and the solid foundation they built, our internal team now feels confident making safe, secure adjustments independently. We couldn’t have asked for a better partner.”
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