TransferWise migrates financial applications to AWS
Global financial technology company TransferWise, which develops more efficient ways to transfer money overseas, migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in order to keep pace with its rapid growth.
It had previously housed its applications in data centers on-premises, these proved extremely difficult to scale and were less than optimal for delivering constant availability for customers.
Thomas Hewer, technology lead at TransferWise, said: “In a physical environment, space is constrained by cost and geography. We wanted to grow globally and didn’t want to have to build out data center partnerships with multiple vendors all over the place.”
Hewer added that: “Our data center was in Europe, and we didn’t have a presence in the new areas we were in, such as Latin America, North America, and Southeast Asia.” AWS, Hewer says, “was clearly designed for what we wanted to do.”
TransferWise’s migration to the cloud began by moving its data backup via AWS Storage Gateway, a hybrid cloud storage service providing on-premises access to the cloud storage.
The company used AWS’s Tape Gateway mode to replace tape backups and transitioned its writing database backups to an AWS Volume Gateway. This allowed it to create Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Snapshots managed by AWS Backup. It was then able to close its Netherlands recovery data center and used this method to migrate around 90 percent of its German data center.
TransferWise has, to date, transferred hundreds of databases to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) via Amazon EBS.
Thomas Hewer says: “We use Amazon RDS wherever we can to reduce the time we spend on database administration and also have the flexibility to run our more ‘special-case’ databases on Amazon EC2.”
AWS has provided TransferWise with a storage solution that is streamlined and simple to use, quickly scalable and can support its continued innovation and global growth, with Thomas Hewer saying that the company could not have rolled out its services to North America, Australia, and New Zealand without AWS.
