Wex Inc.

Executive Summary

At the heart of WEX’s business are enterprise payment processing and information systems running on AWS. This platform offers payment solutions for vehicle fleet operators, travel payments, employee health savings accounts, and others. The platform began showing signs of age and growing technical debt as the company expanded and broadened its global footprint and business offerings.

Deployments of new releases were challenging and high-risk, a lack of automatic fail-over capabilities put their global customer experience at risk, and legacy, outdated capabilities and technical debt were hampering cost-optimization efforts.

Key Challenges

Solutions

VividCloud took on those challenges by modernizing key elements of WEX’s infrastructure and architecture.

Modern pipelines

Develop a build pipeline to automatically containerize the application in two components: one frontend, and one backend. Develop a deployment pipeline for applications within the platform, with the ability to repurpose the pipeline framework for other applications due to IAC component interchangeability.

Restructured deployment ecosystem

Allow developers to deploy their own short-lived infrastructure in development accounts for fast feedback and improved pipeline-based PR testing.

Automated QA

Enable developers to find issues early by building an infrastructure for automated QA and performance testing on branch deployments.

Autoscaling

Implement infrastructure that allows the frontend and backend to scale automatically and independently, based on load.

Blue/Green deployments

Implement a Blue/Green deployment infrastructure that significantly reduces risk by allowing developer-driven, smaller, and more frequent deployments of features and fixes into production.

AWS Services Provided

• AWS CloudWatch
• AWS ElastiCache
• AWS VZPC
• AWS ECS
• AWS EC2-ELB
• AWS CodeDeploy
• AWS ELB

• AWS Route53
• AWS S3
• AWS Lambda
• AWS Kinesis Datastream
• AWS Kinesis Firehose
• AWS EFS

End Results

WEX realized significant benefits from an entirely modernized pipeline and reductions of risk during deployments.

• Builds and deployments are automated and use the same process from Dev, through Staging, and into Production environments.
• Frontend and backend components independently scale up and down automatically, based on demand.
• Developers can quickly deploy new builds to production, test them in the production environment, and then roll forward or back using a Blue/Green system.
• New deployments are no longer large, high-risk, late-night events. Instead, they are frequent, smaller, normal business-hour events.
• Client realized significant cost savings by optimizing through automatic scaling. And their customers benefited from improved response and uptime.