Amazon Web Services Case Study: CardInfoLink

Established in 2010, Shanghai CardInfoLink Data Service Co., Ltd. (“CardInfoLink”) specializes in domestic and cross-border payment processing and data services. Its businesses range from UnionPay card acquiring and international bank card acquiring and issuance processing, to overseas and innovative O2O payment processing services. CardInfoLink is headquartered in Shanghai, China, with one domestic branch and four overseas branches. Over half of its some 200 employees are engineers.

CardInfoLink, which received investment from Sequoia Capital in 2014, is the only third-party service provider in China that has established system and network connections with all six major international payment card organizations. With the boom of Internet Finance, CardInfoLink plans to further enhance its technologies and services and broaden its business to become a leading data processor in the Chinese payment industry, be able to process massive volume of transactions, and help its partners unlock the business potentials of various payment applications and users. It strives to be a vital part of China’s payment industry and a contributor to the payment infrastructures of the “Internet Plus” era.

CardInfoLink has been positioned as a technology service provider from the day it was founded. Connecting payment card issuers and organizations with acquirers and merchants, CardInfoLink offers the underlying technologies that power the payment industry and help it run seamlessly. Over the years, CardInfoLink’s services have expanded from third-party and consolidated payment to mobile payment infrastructure, as business now also extends to the overseas market. Closely following the global footsteps of Alipay and WeChat Pay, CardInfoLink was among the first wave of payment service providers to offer international services, and indeed a leader in replicating domestic business models and success on the global stage.

Acquiring and payment processing lies at the core of CardInfoLink’s expanding overseas business and demands rock solid system stability. Moreover, customers’ recognition and acceptance of the underlying IT infrastructure is also a major factor of consideration. Previously, CardInfoLink mainly relied on IDC hosting services, complemented by public cloud services to support business growth in the domestic market. But taking IDC services overseas not only comes with disproportionally high system and management costs, but also severely limits resource and cost scalability as business expands. Moreover, in the scenarios such as flash sales or similarity, the hardware and network environment in the traditional IDC setup would be overstretched to maintain the level of stability. The impossible trinity of low maintenance, reasonable cost, and achievement of business objects under the IDC model makes this solution unsustainable.

Fundamentally, CardInfoLink needs an IT infrastructure that well-balances stability, scalability, and cost—delivering the committed SLA, easily expandable system features and performance, and supporting dynamic changes to the system cost structure to achieve optimal allocation of resources and expenses. Based on these criteria, CardInfoLink naturally set eyes on a public cloud service.

During the selection process, CardInfoLink carefully weighed the available options in terms of feasibility, cost, and compliance, deciding finally on Amazon Web Services as its preferred cloud service provider that would power its overseas business. In Jacky’s view, the following factors were the key drivers of this decision.

From third-party payment to aggregate payment and then to mobile payment infrastructure, CardInfoLink has now deployed its EVO Cloud service on AWS. Overseas business now encompasses WeChat Pay and Alipay as well as local wallets such as WeChat HK, Grab Pay in Singapore, and NTT Docomo in Japan. Currently CardInfoLink has business in more than 30 countries and regions worldwide through its regional offices and teams in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Singapore, providing integrated technical solutions to the mainstream acquiring banks and third-party payment companies around the world.

Jacky said what the benefit CardInfoLink using AWS are in the following ways:

First, AWS has significantly reduced the complexity of system monitoring and cross-regional network connections, and hence the upkeep burden of its system and network hardware environment. For instance, the combination of Amazon EC2’s AMI lifecycle management function with CardInfoLink’s proprietary, MongoDB Oplog-based incremental backup feature helps control the company’s backup resources and costs and enables periodic full backup plus incremental backup. With VPC Peering, Amazon PrivateLink, and CloudWatch, CardInfoLink is able to build fast, secure cross-regional networks, reducing latency from seconds to the millisecond-level for more efficient coordination of resources.

Second, it comes with significant cost optimizations, enabling faster launch-to-profitability cycle for product and service innovations. For the hardware cost component, AWS allows CardInfoLink to dynamically scale resources, and hence system cost, with business volume, which prevents large-scale hardware investment. For the upkeep and staff cost component, AWS makes it possible for CardInfoLink to reassign team from traditional maintenance tasks to innovation and site reliability engineering (SRE) activities. Notably, the cloud-based DevOps system, based on the fusion of Amazon EKS and ElastiCache with the CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) pipeline, has shortened software iteration cycle from 4-6 weeks to 2 weeks.

Third, AWS delivers security, stability, and system performance to drive sustainable business growth. At the system level, Amazon WAF and Amazon Shield offer essential protection against common threats such as DDoS, and their penetration tests and vulnerability scans help CardInfoLink keep its application platform free of security incident for many years in a row. At the data-level, static and dynamic data encryption is performed at every stage such as storage and transmission, while TLS is enabled for databases. Amazon KMS helps CardInfoLink to manage production environment keys and stay compliant. With AWS, CardInfoLink applications have achieved an overall availability of 99.95%, winning over customers and market shares.

CardInfoLink was also impressed by AWS’ expandability. During one “Double 11 Shopping festival”, EVO Cloud’s transaction per second (TPS) surged more than ten-fold. Thanks to traffic control strategies and auto scaling, the platform handled the traffic spike with aplomb.
CardInfoLink plans to further enrich its online service offerings such as customized marketing systems and risk identification and control. In particular, AWS’ powerful Lake House Architecture and big data-powered machine learning and analytics all have much to offer. The containerization of system services is another major upcoming project. “Whether its cloud-based solutions or local architectures based on the customers’ own resource pools, AWS can help CardInfoLink meet customer needs through a sensible approach and continue to break new ground,” Jacky concluded.