Customer Problem:
Amount needed to modernize their SaaS lending platform so that Avant could be split into multiple companies that could scale separately and address key operational challenges. Their infrastructure lacked proper tenant isolation between banking customers, making it difficult to manage costs and enforce security boundaries. They needed a modernized platform that would enable rapid onboarding of new banking partners while maintaining strict isolation of customer environments. The existing single-account architecture made it nearly impossible to attribute costs to specific customers or properly segment workloads.
The Solution:
With rapid success and growth brought the difficulties of larger volumes of data, along with the increasing complexity of how data could be utilized across the organization. Furthermore, the tools selected early in the startup cycle became inadequate to deal with, especially with the higher demands and challenges that came with an increasing data platform environment. Amount knew they needed to find a better set of tools and processes to meet the immediate needs of the data team who were looking for a sizable reduction in overall management over-head.
Additionally, Amount was using a third party for the big data processing, but their existing hosted solution could not handle the anticipated scale, and the lack of reliable support increased the cost of ownership and unpredictable uptime and runtime of the solution, leading to missed SLA’s. Amount was also using Luigi, a well-known tool built by Spotify for their data pipelines, but the increasing usage and the effort to manage the tool internally was putting unnecessary demands on the data team. A more modern approach that would include a migration path from their diverse set of data sources in AWS such as Aurora and Postgres RDS into their S3 based data lakes, would form the foundation of the requirements on the data side. In addition, reduced management overhead and infrastructure reusability were driving demands from the DevOps side of the business. The ideal solution would be deployable and rely on their existing Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to provide the necessary flexibility, while addressing overall security and regulatory requirements, and data isolation across the organization.
The Technology
The solution was built on key AWS services including Organizations for account management, EKS for containerized workloads, Aurora for databases, and Transit Gateway for networking. Additional services like AWS Config, GuardDuty, CloudTrail and SSO provided security, compliance and access control capabilities. Everything was deployed via Terraform with standardized modules and patterns that could be consistently replicated across customer environments.
The Outcomes
Amount successfully separated from Avant while improving their security posture and operational capabilities. New customer environment provisioning time was reduced from weeks to minutes through automation. Infrastructure management overhead was reduced by over 50% through containerization and managed services adoption. The multi-account architecture provided proper cost allocation and tenant isolation while standardized deployment patterns accelerated customer onboarding. This modernized platform positioned Amount for continued growth in serving bank customers.
