FTMO
Scaling the fastest growing fintech in Central Europe
FTMO is a fintech company which created new trading industry called modern prop trading where people get rewarded for trading activity on demo accounts. Due to rapid business growth, they sought to bring their technological solutions up to speed.
In 2021, FTMO approached Applifting with a request to analyze their architecture and propose a suitable solution for further scaling. This solution had to integrate smoothly into production environments without disrupting the business operations.
Skills deployed
- Java and Kotlin
- Spring Boot
- Kafka
- Elastic
- Keycloak
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- Terraform
- Quality assurance
- Cloud engineering
- Solution architecture
- Team augmentation, 5 people
MISSION: Design and implement a highly scalable architecture
FTMO wanted to turn their monolithic system
into a microservice architecture with a cloud- based infrastructure. This upgrade would ensure scalability and flexibility for future growth. Due to the nature of business, it was crucial to be GDPR compliant and increase the security for platform users.
CHALLENGE: Develop a strategy minimizing operational disruption
An effective audit of the whole system
was necessary to design a suitable solution. It was important to identify the starting point as we needed to make fast progress and achieve FTMO’s goals quickly without disrupting the operations.
The switch to microservices brought about several challenges, the first and major one being —where to start with minimal changes to achieve the maximal impact. We had to figure out how to make a seamless transition into a cloud and how to implement authentication and authorization in a distributed system. Quality assurance automations and processes also needed to be set up and implemented.
SOLUTION: Implement an out-of-the-box feature
Applifting successfully migrated the existing infrastructure
into a fully automated Kubernetes-based solution on the Google Cloud Platform, establishing a completely automated CI/CD pipeline. Then, we implemented an OIDC IdP solution based on Keycloak that enabled authentication and authorization in a distributed system, addressed GDPR challenges, and introduced SSO and 2FA features. We also helped shift the approach to a professional QA process and showed FTMO the direction of automation.
Finally, our team began transitioning essential knowledge to the client. We assisted the teams with analysis and architecture and provided consultation on potential challenges. This enabled FTMO to gradually take over the reins of development and maintain key expertise in- house.
We really appreciated such a professional and systematic approach to development and way of thinking about our problems and goals.
