Esusu Gains Secure AWS Foundation and Infrastructure Automation During Cloud Modernization Process

Executive Summary

Esusu is the leading financial technology platform that leverages data solutions to empower residents and improve property performance. Esusu's rent reporting platform captures rental payment data and reports it to credit bureaus to boost credit scores. This allows renters to build and establish their credit scores while helping property owners mitigate against initiating evictions, powered by differentiated data and insights. Founded in 2018, Esusu’s customers reach over 3 million rental units across all 50 states in the US.

While modernizing its core applications, Esusu decided it was time to enhance its code deployment process. With ClearScale’s help, Esusu was able to accomplish this via DevOps and cloud infrastructure automation, both of which will be valuable going forward in the ever-evolving financial technology industry.

Challenge

Esusu was in the process of refactoring and modernizing its core applications on the cloud. The company wanted to increase its cloud-native capabilities and boost operations, which included improving segregation and automation within the code promotion process. To do this, Esusu needed to create a solid foundation for new test, stage, and production environments in AWS.

The company was targeting Amazon EKS as the deployment platform and required a scalable foundation for implementing DevOps best practices.

Esusu leveraged ClearScale, an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with the DevOps Competency, for assistance. Esusu wanted a new AWS Landing Zone that complied with the latest cloud infrastructure deployment, configuration, security, and CI/CD automation best practices. This meant standardizing DevOps processes and procedures on the AWS cloud, work that ClearScale has executed for clients across countless industries.

The ClearScale Solution

ClearScale first reviewed the requirements for Esusu’s impending modernization. Based on this initial evaluation, ClearScale architected a secure landing zone and then deployed the test, stage, and production environments using a combination of solutions – AWS Control Tower and Terraform.

AWS Control Tower simplifies the process of monitoring and securing multi-account environments. ClearScale used AWS Control Tower as the base for Esusu’s landing zone to ensure security and governance. Terraform is an Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) solution that empowers DevOps teams to automate crucial infrastructure tasks. The ClearScale team developed Terraform automation for several key areas for future deployments, including networking, databases, security tooling and policies, logging and monitoring, EKS clusters, ArgoCD with Rollouts, and storage modules.

Furthermore, ClearScale integrated Esusu’s new organization with their Okta IdP service as part of the project. Two other cloud services that were instrumental were AWS Security Hub and Amazon GuardDuty. Security Hub automatically conducts security checks and consolidates security alerts for IT teams. GuardDuty gives customers intelligent threat detection, which is particularly valuable for organizations like Esusu that deal with large volumes of financial transaction data.

Altogether, ClearScale’s expertise combined with AWS tools enabled Esusu to take its cloud infrastructure to the next level.

Benefits

With ClearScale’s enhancement, Esusu enhanced their security and cloud foundation based on DevOps best practices. The new AWS Landing Zone met Esusu’s compliance requirements and took advantage of consistent infrastructure automation delivered by Terraform and ArgoCD with Rollouts.

Now, the Esusu development team can spend more time focusing on application development and innovation rather than on infrastructure management. Esusu’s revamped DevOps capability and infrastructure automation is exactly what the organization needed to increase efficiency and innovative potential.

Architectural Diagrams

AWS Organizations

Okta Integration with Control Tower

ArgoCD with Rollouts Demo

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