Cloud-Native Platform Modernization

AWS Landing Zone, EKS and CI/CD for Efex

Efex is a Latin American fintech platform that provides digital payment solutions, enabling businesses to collect, pay, and manage their finances in a unified platform.

To support their rapid growth and ensure enterprise-grade reliability, Efex engaged binbash to design and deploy a secure, scalable AWS cloud foundation — including a full AWS Landing Zone, multi-environment EKS clusters, and automated CI/CD pipelines for their Django API and React front-end applications.

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Scaling across Latin America without a cloud foundation

Efex faced critical infrastructure challenges as their platform scaled across Latin America. Their development team operated without a structured cloud foundation, lacked proper environment isolation between DEV, PRD, and DR, and had no automated deployment pipelines.

Key bottlenecks included:

No centralized AWS Organization or account structure, creating governance and cost visibility gaps.
Manual deployments for their Django monolith and 3 microservices (Contacts, Account Statements, Payments) with no container orchestration.
Four separate front-end applications (Onboarding, Payments, Dashboard, SDK) deployed without a repeatable pipeline blueprint.
No disaster recovery strategy, leaving the platform exposed to extended downtime in the event of a regional failure.

Five phases, every resource provisioned as code

binbash delivered SOW-002, implementing a comprehensive AWS cloud modernization across five major phases — all provisioned as Infrastructure-as-Code using the binbash Leverage™ framework and Terraform:

AWS Landing Zone: A full AWS Organization with Management, Security, Shared, Apps-Dev, Apps-PRD, and Apps-DR accounts. AWS SSO (Identity Center) with Permission Sets for DevOps and Developer roles, CloudTrail, IAM Access Analyzer, KMS encryption, and secure account baseline settings across all accounts.
Networking: Multi-account VPC architecture across primary and secondary regions (mx-central-1 and us-east-1), VPC peerings, Route 53 private hosted zones, and a Pritunl VPN server on EC2 for secure private access to all environments.
EKS Compute Platform: Production-grade Amazon EKS clusters deployed in Apps-PRD (standard nodes) and Apps-Dev (spot instances), with Nginx Ingress, ExternalDNS, Cert-Manager, ArgoCD, Argo Image Updater, Cluster Autoscaler, and External Secrets integrated with AWS Secrets Manager.
CI/CD Pipelines: GitHub Actions pipelines for building and pushing Docker images to AWS ECR for all back-end services, and CloudFront+S3 deployment pipelines for all four front-end applications, with Slack notifications throughout.
Disaster Recovery: A full DR environment in a secondary region with RDS Aurora replica, S3 replication, EKS cluster scaled to zero via ArgoCD, and DNS-based traffic failover via Route 53.

Acting as CTO, Cloud Architect and DevOps Lead

Acting with the capabilities of a CTO, Cloud Architect, and DevOps Lead, binbash guided Efex's team through an enterprise-grade cloud modernization:

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) & Leverage Framework: All AWS resources provisioned via Terraform using the binbash Leverage™ reference architecture, ensuring repeatability, auditability, and team knowledge transfer.
Security & Compliance Hardening: Secure baselines across all accounts including enforced MFA, encrypted EBS, S3 ACL lockdown, AWS Config organization-wide, Amazon GuardDuty, Security Hub, and AWS WAFv2 on the API Gateway.
GitOps Deployment with ArgoCD: All application deployments managed via ArgoCD with Kustomize templates and Argo Image Updater for automated image tag updates, enabling a fully code-driven deployment lifecycle.

A platform the team owns

By following binbash's architectural guidance and taking progressive ownership of the AWS platform, Efex's engineering team now operates a secure, automated, and highly available cloud foundation. Their deployment cycle shifted from manual processes to fully automated GitOps pipelines, and the team gained the expertise to independently manage and extend the infrastructure.

~95%: Faster deployments.Hours of manual effort to ~5 min via automated CI/CD.
~90%: Reduction in downtime exposure.Zero DR to ~15 min RTO with automated failover.
~70%: Lower DEV/DR compute costs.Spot Instances on non-production EKS vs on-demand.

Delivered in five milestones

AWS Landing Zone: Full AWS Organization, SSO, IAM, CloudTrail, KMS, VPNs, and account baselines delivered within 4 weeks of project start.
EKS PRD + CI/CD: Production EKS cluster, all back-end and front-end pipelines, RDS Aurora, DynamoDB, S3, and API Gateway live within 10 weeks.
EKS DEV Environment: Complete DEV environment mirroring production deployed and validated within 9 weeks of Milestone 2.
Disaster Recovery: Full DR environment with EKS, RDS replicas, S3 replication, and DR plan testing completed within 8 weeks of Milestone 2.
Infrastructure Hardening: GuardDuty, Security Hub, AWS Config, WAFv2, and CloudWatch Observability Operator deployed and validated within 3 weeks of Milestone 3.

Well-Architected, and built to scale across Latin America

Through this engagement, binbash successfully transformed Efex's infrastructure from a fragmented, manually-operated environment into a secure, fully automated AWS-native platform. Built entirely on the AWS Well-Architected Framework and the binbash Leverage™ open-source reference architecture, the solution gave Efex complete control over their cloud costs, deployment velocity, and security posture. With a self-sufficient engineering team and a solid DevOps foundation in place, Efex is well-positioned to scale their fintech platform across Latin America.