Scaling with Azure Cloud Infrastructure

An investment company set out to launch its new investment platform. To make it happen, they needed a foundation they could trust. Today, their platform runs on a secure, scalable, and cost-efficient Azure cloud infrastructure, giving the team the confidence to grow without limits.

FinTech

About the project

A Canadian company helps individuals make smarter financial decisions through personalised investment consulting. Their vision was to bring professional advisory services to a wider audience with a web platform and mobile applications. Thus, clients can flexibly check balances, adjust portfolios, or explore new investment opportunities on the go.

Client's needs

The team needed to build both web and mobile products to deliver financial consulting services digitally. Bringing the roadmap to life required a solid foundation to run it all on. The project required infrastructure development from scratch, as there was no existing foundation in place. Certain services had to run under strict access rules and from whitelisted Canadian IP addresses to meet broker requirements, so our task was to stay compliant and secure.

Shaping the Solution

We set out to create a reliable infrastructure for a platform that unites advisory services and investment tools in one place. The goal was to enable clients to open and manage accounts online, monitor portfolios, and choose between self-directed trading or professionally managed strategies within a single ecosystem.

Compliance and security were at the core of development. The platform was built with features ensuring investor protection through partnerships with regulated custodians and coverage under the Canadian Investor Protection Fund (CIPF). To achieve this, the development team worked across multiple parallel tracks, each requiring stable environments to prevent conflicts and deployment delays. Given the sensitivity of financial operations, we implemented full visibility into all processes, leaving no room for blind spots.

Building from Zero

We created isolated environments for development, testing, and production. This separation allowed the team to experiment freely. Domains, DNS, and storage resources were provisioned early. Core services such as servers, databases, and storage for backend, frontend, and mobile were deployed. Every part of the product gained a reliable foundation on which every other component can securely operate.

Calibrating Security

Given the financial nature of the platform, compliance with broker requirements was a high priority. We introduced a secure access layer allowing certain services and subdomains to be reached only through a VPN with specific IP addresses. OpenVPN was chosen for cloud cost optimisation and confidence in security. This setup kept the system compliant, but developers still could test and interact with services.

Automating the Release Cycle

To support fast delivery, we established CI/CD automation pipelines and SonarQube integration for all components.

-The backend workflows handled container builds and deployments. Each microservice was containerised, and Docker images were pushed and managed via Helm charts.

-For the frontend, this included automated publishing to Azure Static Web Apps with environment variables handled per stage.

-For mobile, it covered iOS and Android builds with direct submission to the stores.

Keeping Operations Reasonable

Financial services can’t afford downtime or silent failures, so for this setup, we focused on monitoring a lot. System metrics, service logs, and alerts allowed us to track infrastructure health.

We connected Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, and Alertmanager alongside Azure Insights to build full visibility into logs, metrics, and performance. Thus, the team could detect problems early and stay confident that issues wouldn’t reach customers.

Business impact

A full-scale infrastructure was delivered: servers, services, domains, emails, and CI/CD pipelines. This gave the investment company a stable and automated foundation. They don’t have to rely on manual deployments and fragmented environments.

The team got a more trustworthy platform due to secure access and compliance with broker requirements. Additionally, transparent monitoring allows a quick response to any issues. Our DevOps services turned the platform’s backend, workflows, and deployments into a foundation with an opportunity for automation and growth.