MoneyGram Accelerates Digital Transformation & Streamlines Amazon EKS Operations with Rafay

MoneyGram (NASDAQ: MGI) is a global leader in cross-border P2P payments and money transfers. Its products, services, and 2400+ employees enable family and friends to quickly and affordably send money in more than 200 countries and territories, with over 70 countries now digitally enabled. MoneyGram leverages its modern, mobile, and API-driven platform and collaborates with the world’s leading brands to serve millions of people each year through both its walk-in business and its direct-to-consumer digital business.

MoneyGram’s Environment

“With the help of Rafay Systems and AWS, we are able to deliver new, innovative products and services to the global market faster and manage them all cost-effectively.”

Joe Vaughan Chief Technology Officer, MoneyGram International

Fast-Paced Digital Transformation Initiatives in
Regulated Industries Require Modern Solutions

MoneyGram’s customer footprint is constantly growing. As MoneyGram prepares for a new era of tech-minded customers, their application developers launched a strategic digital transformation initiative to quickly move production workloads to cloud infrastructure. “Our strategic digital transformation initiative is critical to meeting our goal of providing modern financial solutions to customers around the world,” said Joe Vaughan, Chief Technology Officer at MoneyGram International. “MoneyGram’s modernization strategy is building the future of digital payments,” said Vaughan. “That means we must reimagine the ways family and friends send money around the globe and reinvent how we deliver our products and services to our customers.”

To ensure success of their digital transformation initiative, the company chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their strategic cloud provider and Kubernetes, specifically Amazon EKS, to rapidly deploy & manage their cloud-native applications.

MoneyGram tried a DIY Kubernetes operations solution but experienced several key challenges that stalled their modernization journey. MoneyGram found it difficult to obtain a single, unified view of all applications and clusters across global AWS Regions in which they operate.

Their on-premises, DIY Kubernetes operations solution, required too much overhead to manage clusters. Kubernetes upgrades were time consuming and required a team of Kubernetes experts. This problem compounded as the number of clusters and AWS usage grew. Finding talent with the right Kubernetes skillset was difficult and expensive to hire.

In addition, the team needed a way to standardize clusters across the various applications their engineering and business units required and an easy way for the environments to be centrally defined, managed, and enforced. Operating within any financial services industry requires a high level of access security controls, enforced isolation boundaries, and auditing of all Kubectl actions due to PCI regulatory requirements.

Standardizing Kubernetes Across theOrganization with Rafay and Amazon EKS

After evaluating several vendors, MoneyGram chose the Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform (KOP) to streamline Kubernetes operations. With its deep integration with Amazon EKS, KOP delivered a single pane of glass for global visibility and monitoring of all Amazon EKS clusters and automated cluster lifecycle management of 40+ workloads, including cluster provisioning, scaling, and oneclick Amazon EKS upgrades fleet-wide.

Rafay’s KOP also allowed MoneyGram to create 100+ cluster blueprints to define, procure, and enforce standard cluster configurations across development and production environments consisting of 20+ add-ons such as Splunk, New Relic, and Nginx. Further, Rafay’s KOP natively connected to MoneyGram’s Okta account for instant single sign-on (no-code integration) for all developers, operations, and support personnel and enabled rolebased access control and isolation boundaries to be easily defined and enforced through Kubectl with Rafay’s Zero-Trust Access Service

With Rafay, MoneyGram launched a fully-functional Kubernetes operations practice in less than three months, eliminating the complexities of Kubernetes and deploying more modern applications into AWS faster.

Rafay’s Zero Trust Access Service also enabled fully auditable user and activity logs for PCI regulatory compliance.

Fully Operational Kubernetes Service in Less than 3 Months

MoneyGram is a fast-moving Fintech company with aggressive cloud infrastructure goals. With Rafay, MoneyGram launched a fully-functional Kubernetes operations practice in less than three months, eliminating the complexities of Kubernetes and deploying more modern applications into AWS faster. MoneyGram’s relatively small DevOps team can now focus on highervalue work vs. managing Kubernetes details. “With the help of Rafay Systems and AWS, we are able to deliver new, innovative products and services to the global market faster and manage them all cost-effectively,” said Vaughan.

In the near future, MoneyGram is looking to extend its Kubernetes infrastructure by managing on-premise applications using Amazon EKS-D and Rafay. Rafay’s KOP provides a single place to consolidate and manage all of MoneyGram’s Kubernetes infrastructure, whether in the cloud or on-premise.