Advancing innovation by migrating and modernizing on AWS with Bank of Georgia

In 2024 and 2025, Bank of Georgia was named World’s Best Digital Bank by Global Finance. Listed as reasons for the bank’s success were its “strategic vision, customer focus, and in-house technological innovation.”

Bank of Georgia’s innovation drive began several years before, when it decided to break apart its monolithic architecture for reduced dependency between product teams. It also wanted its services to become more resilient and independently deployable. “After thorough research, it became evident that decomposing into microservices and establishing a robust cloud infrastructure was the modern and effective path forward,” says Mariam Salia, head of IT program management and leader of the cloud adoption program at Bank of Georgia. The bank began experimenting, while also searching among providers for enterprise-level support.

After meeting in person with AWS team members, Bank of Georgia chose to modernize on AWS. “The expertise, structured support, and commitment that AWS brought to the table were the factors that elevated our journey from preparation to execution—and ultimately to the success we see today,” says Salia. “We see AWS as not just a vendor but as a collaborator.”

To lay the groundwork for cloud transformation, Bank of Georgia conducted an infrastructure maturity assessment that evaluated its applications. It also created dedicated teams for cloud governance, FinOps, and product engineering, and worked with regulators to align on compliance.

A 4-year cloud adoption plan followed, along with a detailed migration framework. “To fully realize the benefits of the cloud, you must deeply understand its operating model,” says David Beradze, CTO at Bank of Georgia. “It’s not just about moving workloads; it’s about rethinking how applications are architected.”

As it began migrating, Bank of Georgia worked with the AWS team to design the target architecture, validate strategy, and align with the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which helps companies understand the pros and cons of their decisions while building systems on AWS. “AWS provided comprehensive, multi-layered support throughout our entire cloud transformation journey,” says Zviad Kviralashvili, technology tribe lead and deputy IT director at Bank of Georgia. “Their teams consistently demonstrated a genuine commitment to our success.”

Building on its experience with using Kubernetes to break up its monolithic architecture, Bank of Georgia implemented Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a service for building, running, and scaling production-ready Kubernetes applications. The bank also uses AWS services for compute, database and storage, analytics and AI, networking, observability, and security. “We actively adopt managed AWS services, which reduces our operational overhead, improves reliability, and focuses our efforts on delivering business value instead of managing infrastructure,” says Kviralashvili.

Because Bank of Georgia treats process automation as an important principle for achieving high efficiency, it implemented infrastructure as code for around 80 percent of its infrastructure provisioning on AWS. Bank of Georgia also uses AWS Direct Connect, which companies use to create a dedicated network connection to AWS. Using AWS Direct Connect, Bank of Georgia maintains regulatory compliance while keeping latency low, performance consistent, and availability high.

Now on AWS, Bank of Georgia can innovate at speed. Rather than provisioning hardware months or years in advance, the bank can spin up new environments whenever it wants to test and quickly deploy new features for customers. This includes innovation with generative AI, which the bank has started to experiment with using Amazon SageMaker AI, a service for building, training, and deploying AI models, and Amazon Bedrock, the platform for building generative AI applications and agents at production scale.

Performance has also improved. Latency for the bank’s Account Statements service was reduced by 50 percent after Bank of Georgia migrated to Amazon OpenSearch Service, a managed retrieval engine built on OpenSearch for agentic AI, search, and analytics. The use of managed services keeps operations efficient, and Bank of Georgia can keep its solution highly available for customers, maintaining 99.99 percent uptime for services deployed on AWS.

Also important for customers, on AWS Bank of Georgia’s services can scale as its customer base expands each year or when engagement spikes. For example, the bank launched a temporary app to gamify engagement by asking users questions and providing rewards. That campaign created peaks in demand, which the bank’s AWS infrastructure scaled up to meet. After the campaign, the bank scaled back down. “We know that if we have increased demand or if we launch a customer campaign, we can scale rapidly on AWS,” says Beradze. “We consider AWS the best fit for this kind of software.”