AWS Cloud : ME Bank Case Study

Cloud computing :

To run our application we need resources like RAM, CPU and Storage etc. for this we have to pay upfront amount , and after some time if don’t need that resources then , money will be waste after buying so much resources at high cost. So it is an idea to provide resources on demand while resources could be anywhere in the world. this is called cloud computing.

AWS (amazon web services):

Many big companies provide cloud services and amazon is one of the cloud provider and it is very vast cloud provider. It is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers — including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies — are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.

companies benefitting using AWS cloud:

To launch a startup , cloud has become a need for new comers , because they don’t when their idea can be viral and multiple client can come to their app or web site to get their service. like this we have some big companies that started their journey with aws resources and today they are world famous companies.

According to Intricately, the top ten AWS users based on EC2 monthly spend are:

1. Netflix: $19 million
2. Twitch: $15 million
3. LinkedIn: $13 million
4. Facebook: $11 million
5. Turner Broadcasting: $10 million
6. BBC: $9 million
7. Baidu: $9 million
8. ESPN: $8 million
9. Adobe: $8 million
10. Twitter: $7 million

ME Bank:

Me Bank, also known as ME, is an Australian direct bank based in Melbourne, Victoria. Initially founded to offer access to home loan products, ME Bank today offers a range of low-cost banking products including home loans, savings accounts, credit cards, term deposits, and transaction accounts.

Me Bank is now a fully-fledged retail bank. The Melbourne headquartered company manages $20 billion in assets and has 800 employees who support 280,000 customers around Australia. Unlike traditional banks, ME Bank services its customers through digital channels, and via workplace and mobile bankers.

The Challenge they face:

Before 2010, ME Bank had to invest a considerable proportion of its income to support inefficient, manual operating processes: even basic tasks such as creating a new customer account were time-consuming and resource-intensive. After a prospective customer had filled out an online form, an ME Bank employee had to re-enter the data manually into a back-end system. This process generated a letter to the customer, who would call the bank to finalize opening the account.

first solution they tried:

These cumbersome processes were not sustainable in a competitive market. In 2010, ME Bank embarked on a four-year, $60 million technology refresh program to upgrade its banking system, management tools, and systems. By mapping the delivery of new technology services and applications to a strict timeline, the bank believed it could reduce operating costs. but it didn’t work great.

ME bank also had their own on-premises datacenter but this infrastructure was not equipped to support the project’s demands . They didn’t have the internal capacity or agility to build the development and testing environments that were demanded by the transformation.

ME Bank also needed to relieve the strain on the web servers in its on-premises datacenter caused by the volume of requests for advertising campaign data. The traffic volumes would stress their website and internet banking services, impacting services to our customers. so they were going to run into a problem making deadlines if they didn’t come up with a different solution. now they choose aws.

Why Amazon Web Services

The bank evaluated five cloud providers before deciding to migrate its development and testing environments to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. but AWS combined full self-service capabilities with cost-effectiveness and they were also impressed by the rapid delivery of new product and service releases. so they choose AWS over others.

Services they use:

1. Amazon Virtual private cloud (VPC)
2. Amazon EC2
3. AWS identity and access management (IAM)
4. Amazon cloudfront and S3

VPC:

ME Bank uses Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to provision an isolated, virtual network in the AWS Asia-Pacific (Sydney) Region. ME Bank’s developers on several Transformation teams build new products and services and complete unit testing before delivering code built in the AWS Cloud to a centralized Environment Services team. Environment Services then deploys the code to environments running on AWS for system integration testing, performance testing, and user acceptance testing.

EC2:

Environment Services provisions development and testing environments on behalf of the Transformation teams. Depending on the workload, the team spins up Amazon EC2 instances ranging from medium to extra-large. AWS CloudFormation is used to replicate instance templates, providing the agility needed to keep pace with the bank’s change program.

IAM:

Environment Services uses AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to structure and monitor different levels of security and access for projects. Eventually, Environment Services plans to provide access to AWS so development, test and support teams can provision their own test and development environments.

Cloudfront and S3:

The bank uses Amazon CloudFront to pull the XML data from an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket and present it to advertising campaigns that may attract one million impressions or more. By delivering data for its advertising campaigns from Amazon CloudFront , ME Bank has been able to maintain fast response times for its customers while delivering large advertising campaigns.

The flexibility and scalability of AWS has enabled ME Bank to ramp up development and testing work as the technology transformation program evolves. They started the program with only three developers Because of the ease with which they can provision new environments, now they have 150 developers to develop and test new banking applications and services.

The Benefits they got

1. Using AWS instead of an on-premises datacenter infrastructure allowed ME Bank to accelerate the provisioning of development and testing environments by up to six weeks. They can create a new environment within one day. They also reduced the cost of delivering development and test environments for new applications and services by 75 percent.
2. The speed of provisioning resources on AWS allowed ME Bank to achieve project milestones and keep the technology refresh program within its $60 million budget. Within three months of starting to use AWS in November 2012, they delivered the first elements of the transformation program for release into production. Without AWS, all those deadlines would have slipped — at the cost of millions of dollars.
3. The scalability of the AWS content delivery solution with cloudfront has enabled them to support a 2000 percent increase in web requests when running their campaigns.
4. Because AWS services are available on demand, ME Bank can use its infrastructure more cost-effectively. The bank typically undertakes testing between 8:00 am and 11:00 pm. Once ME Bank became comfortable with the AWS Cloud, it implemented automatic shutdown of instances after 11:00pm and over weekends. Automating the shutdown of Amazon EC2 instances when they are not using them has proven highly cost-effectives , they reduced their AWS spend by 49 percent per instance.

using AWS Cloud now their focus is on being a great digital bank.

THANK YOU!!