Fitcard, a leader in the payment solutions market since 2011, continuously innovates and excels in developing advanced systems to meet the needs of a diverse customer base. Specialized in mediating the relationship between benefit card administrators and fleet management, Fitcard serves a wide range of business segments.
With a base of approximately 580,000 vehicles, 800,000 drivers and 50,000 users on its platforms, Fitcard differentiates itself by its ability to customize applications and services. In addition, the company is constantly looking for innovation in various sectors.
Challenge
Fitcard handles an immense amount of data, as its payment solutions are widely used in thousands of establishments across Brazil, including gas stations, workshops, restaurants, and supermarkets. These services are essential for everyone, from the average citizen to critical groups in society such as police officers, ambulances, and firefighters.
To maintain efficient operation, all of these establishments need to perform continuous validations on user data, consumption schedules, and units of use. Agility, security, and accuracy in the exchange of financial data have become crucial. Critical services, such as an ambulance waiting for the release of credit for care, cannot be interrupted, under penalty of fines and risks to life.
Until then, Fitcard operated its database on physical servers. However, to meet the growing demands of scalability and automation, it became clear that moving to the cloud was the ideal solution.
What has been proposed
Fitcard opted for Amazon Web Services (AWS) to take advantage of cloud capabilities and relied on Dedalus to ensure a successful migration and operation.
To achieve the goal of high availability, security, and scalability, our team has taken the following technical approach:
Application Division: We start by dividing the client’s application into two distinct parts: the front end and the back end.
High Availability on the Front End: We implemented Amazon Route 53, an AWS DNS and routing service, and established a connection to FortiGate, a network security appliance developed by Fortinet, running on EC2 instances, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). This configuration acted as an active/passive system to ensure high availability on the front end, allowing for uninterrupted operations.
Strengthening Security with WAF: To ensure the security of the environment, we deployed AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall), an Amazon Web Services (AWS) native tool designed to protect applications from malicious attacks. The AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) has been seamlessly integrated with other Amazon Web Services (AWS), allowing for the creation of custom security rules to meet Fitcard’s specific needs.
Private Environments and Load Balancing: The customer’s backend has been allocated in private environments, ensuring restricted access. We have implemented load balancing solutions, including Application Load Balancer (ALB) and Network Load Balancer (NLB), to distribute the workload across resources in an efficient manner.
Highly Available Database: The database, which is the core of Fitcard’s operations with more than 4,000 bases, has been migrated to a SQL Cluster that operates on the active/passive model. The bases were centralized in AmazonFSx, an AWS-managed file storage service, ensuring continuous updating and availability regardless of the active server.
With this project, our team, through rigorous practices such as backup and tests to ensure the functioning of the clusters, provided resilience and reliability to Fitcard’s environment. In addition, database server performance has improved significantly in the cloud, according to customer feedback.
Perceived gains
Six months after the migration, Fitcard confirmed that the stability of the new environments allowed its development team to focus its efforts on engineering and software improvements. High availability, security and scalability are now part of Fitcard’s daily life.
Next steps
Fitcard has ambitious plans for the future, including consolidating its infrastructure and applications with a focus on quality, availability, and security. We will continue to collaborate closely, ensuring that Fitcard achieves its goals and continues to innovate. The next steps involve expanding resources and implementing new tools made available by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
This project exemplifies the capabilities of our team and the strong partnership between Fitcard, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Dedalus, resulting in a highly available and secure cloud infrastructure that enables continuous innovation and growth. Dedalus is proud to have contributed to preparing Fitcard to operate successfully in the cloud.
