PayU Increases Security and Scalability Using AWS Enterprise Support

In 2020, PayU began to work alongside AWS Enterprise Support—which provides a comprehensive suite of resources, including proactive planning, advisory services, automation tools, and 24/7 expert support—to improve the management of its services and incorporate best practices into its processes.

Using AWS Enterprise Support, PayU designed and deployed solutions for four business challenges: building resilience, improving security posture, scaling, and optimizing cost. “We gradually built our confidence and expertise during our AWS journey. Since engaging AWS Enterprise Support, we’ve been seeing much faster growth,” says Shiv Chourasia, DevOps team leader at PayU.

The need for compliance with Indian financial sector regulations required PayU to maintain a disaster recovery (DR) site. PayU faced several challenges using its previous DR solution, including issues in service compatibility because of a multicloud setup, a complex environment, and the need for significant manual operations for functions such as replication/restoration, infrastructure provisioning, and failover/failback. As soon as the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region was launched in 2022, PayU Payments switched to AWS.

The PayU team built a solution on AWS to manage replication using Amazon Aurora Global Database, which replicates data with no impact on database performance. The solution helps with fast local reads with low latency in each Region, provides DR from Region-wide outages, and includes automated backups in the DR Region and automated scripts for infrastructure provisioning and failover/failback.

Using several security solutions that were recommended by AWS Enterprise Support, the company strengthened security and enhanced results during its internal security audits. First, it deployed AWS Network Firewall, a managed service that simplifies deployment of network protection across virtual private clouds, along with AWS Global Accelerator, a networking service to improve the availability, performance, and security of public applications. Thus, PayU improved application performance and reduced compliance audit time.

For edge protection, AWS Enterprise Support recommended AWS WAF, a service for protecting against common bugs and bots, alongside AWS Shield Advanced, which provides additional detection and mitigation against large and sophisticated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, near real-time visibility into attacks, and integration with AWS WAF. Following the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, these services automated the prevention of security issues, so PayU achieved near-zero downtime.

Next, the team implemented Amazon GuardDuty, a threat detection service that nearly continually monitors AWS accounts for malicious activities. To gain more visibility into its infrastructure, PayU used Amazon Inspector, an automated security assessment service that nearly continually scans AWS workloads for software bugs and unintended network exposure. “Using AWS solutions, we can manage our security. The automation has reduced human effort, and we can focus on business goals,” says Manoj Sahu, senior engineering manager at PayU.

In preparation for the festive season, PayU worked alongside AWS Enterprise Support on capacity planning and critical-service scaling. To manage surges in online payment volumes and scale storage and compute on demand, the PayU team implemented Amazon Aurora, which provides high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. The teams also performed service operational reviews and enhanced service limits and infrastructure pre-warming. During sale events, AWS Enterprise Support was on standby to handle load issues.

PayU has been growing rapidly for several years because of a digital boom in India. As a result, controlling costs became one of its top priorities. The leadership at PayU worked alongside AWS Enterprise Support proactively to establish a financial operations (FinOps) practice, which gives each division visibility into—and accountability for—its designated portion of overall cloud infrastructure costs.

By implementing AWS solutions, PayU has optimized its cost and strengthened its resilience, security, and scalability. Through internal initiatives and AWS guidance, PayU Credit saved approximately 105,000 dollars and PayU Payments saved approximately 120,000 dollars in monthly expenses. This was achieved by optimizing the infrastructure, migrating to AWS Graviton processors—designed to deliver excellent price performance for cloud workloads—for managed services, and adopting Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, which can be used to run fault-tolerant workloads, at scale. “AWS is key in every decision at PayU, and we have good support from the entire AWS team,” says Nipul Sawant, associate DevOps director at PayU.

During the DR drill, the failover completed in 32 minutes—down from 2 hours with the previous DR solution—exceeding PayU’s recovery time objective (RTO) of 25 minutes. PayU also achieved a near-zero recovery point objective (RPO), the maximum amount of data that an organization can tolerate losing. “Using AWS Managed Services, we have a smooth failover/failback process. Plus, we have automated our environment creation so that we can create a complex environment within 1 day,” says Shiv.

To manage volume surges during the Indian festive season, the PayU team scaled its critical infrastructure using AWS Countdown. Transactions per minute peaked to approximately 24,000 from about 7,200 during the 2023 festive season. “Through AWS Managed Services and AWS Enterprise Support, we can scale easily and handle virtually any load,” says Manoj.