Investree: Re-Architect App for Better Financial Services- Alibaba Cloud Case Study

Financial Services

Asia Pacific

Enterprise/Public Sector

"By leveraging the solution proposed by Alibaba Cloud, Investree completed the re-architecture from monolith to microservices; shortened its time of app development and deployment; reduced IT and resources expenditures; and improved reliability and agility."

About Investree

Investree is Indonesia's leading B2B marketplace lending platform for SMEs that is fully licensed by the Financial Services Authority of Indonesia (OJK) for both conventional and Shariah businesses. Investree is based in Indonesia but has grown its regional footprint in Thailand and soon to be in the Philippines. Investree's mission as a marketplace is to use technology and data to provide small businesses with access to working capital solutions from retail and institutional lenders. By August 2019, Investree has facilitated over USD 230 million dollars since inception, providing access to more than 1000 SMEs, while maintaining robust and healthy asset quality.

Challenge

Investree developed strong partnerships with ecosystems to drive origination, enhance verification, and reduce the cost of acquisition. These include strategic partnerships such as e-procurement platforms, payment gateway providers to source potential SME while accessing its digital footprint through the ecosystem to assess the credibility. On the other hand, Investree aligns with incumbents such as banks to source working capital loans.

Investree built the front-end and back-end platform through a monolithic architecture, and the platform was hosted in a local ISP. As the modules and features of the application were increasing, the IT operation team was facing the following challenges:

Lack of agility and long release cycles. In a monolith architecture, any change request and upgrade will involve editing the database, code, and front-end platform, which is quite a time-intensive process.

Increasing system fragility with frequent changes. Since all individual components on the platform are highly coupled and dependent on each other, a single point of failure can bring down the entire system, leading to the outage of business operation.

Risk of network and geographic redundancy. By hosting the platform in local ISP, service level agreement (SLA) and redundancy plans are not in place to keep the IT operations running smoothly 24/7, especially with the business expansion into other countries.

Why Alibaba Cloud?

In consideration of SLAs, data portability, long-term costs, user management, and security, Investree decided to migrate the existing infrastructure to the public cloud. Infrastructure as a Service Migration of the application platform involves deployment of the application on the public cloud provider's servers.

Alibaba Cloud has is a world-class public cloud provider with a strong local presence in Indonesia; Alibaba Cloud IaaS platform is cost-effective & flexible and delivers resilience, performance, and security required to host applications. Additionally, Alibaba Cloud has dedicated local technical expertise with right skill-sets and fast response time. What’s more, Alibaba Cloud’s right-fit of solutions feature with high scalability and availability to meet business requirements.

Alibaba Cloud team worked closely with Investree IT team across the evaluation, planning, design, and migration, and provided a feasible migration plan as stated below.

Architecture

Microservices decouple the frontend layer from the backend platform data layer through APIs. Therefore, each component of the platform, such as the frontend, backend, and databases, can be updated or changed individually without interfering with each other.

Investree deployed the application on Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an excellent platform for complex applications comprised of multiple microservices. It offers a more straightforward and customary way of transferring the application from on-premise to cloud. What’s more, since migrating a monolith architecture to microservices involves breaking up the monolith into its own, single service components, the migration took place in an incremental approach. This pattern reduces risk as individual components are built and implemented.

As a result, the application was running on Elastic Compute Service(ECS), Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK), Container Registry, ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL, ApsaraDB for Redis, ApsaraDB for PolarDB, Express Connect, and Object Storage Service(OSS) in the Alibaba Cloud Indonesia region. Besides, Investree also deployed open-source Kubernetes-specific tools such as Helm package manager and the Jenkins X pipeline automation tool, which are fully compatible with Alibaba Cloud products.

Benefits

By leveraging the solution proposed by Alibaba Cloud, Investree completed the re-architecture from monolith to microservices; shortened its time of app development and deployment; reduced IT and resources expenditures; and improved reliability and agility.

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