Freecharge Transforms Its Digital Payment Platform on AWS to Improve Market Competitiveness

Freecharge is a digital payments company wholly owned by Axis Bank, the third largest private-sector bank in India. The company’s payment app—Freecharge Wallet—is used by 100 million registered users across the country to send money and pay bills; Freecharge also offers a lending solution, a consumer credit card, merchant services, and an online payment gateway.

To maintain its competitive edge, Freecharge wanted to innovate its solutions, making it easier for consumers and businesses to use financial services. Rameshwar Gupta, chief technology officer at Freecharge, explains, “To stay competitive, we needed to get more out of our IT—lowering costs, going to market faster, and reducing administration where possible.”

To improve the management of its Kubernetes clusters, Freecharge migrated its microservices environment to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), achieving an increase in operational efficiency. These Kubernetes clusters house about 250 microservices across development, quality assurance, pre-production, and production environments, driving Freecharge's robust DevOps lifecycle.

“We achieved a 22 percent reduction in AWS costs and reduced deployment time from hours to just a few minutes, boosting team productivity,” says Gupta. “This empowers Freecharge to accomplish multiple software releases daily, driving innovation and agility.” Additionally, Freecharge decided to modernize its data store running on Aerospike, a NoSQL database engine that stored customer session data on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. To solve issues relating to cost and scalability on Aerospike, Freecharge worked closely with AWS to migrate its data store to Amazon DynamoDB, a secure, serverless NoSQL database.

Vikalp Singh, director of infrastructure at Freecharge, says, “We seamlessly migrated from Aerospike to Amazon DynamoDB, achieving a 60 percent reduction in session data storage costs. This streamlined database scaling, freeing the business from the complexities of self-managed infrastructure.” 

Freecharge had previously used the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region for its production environments since its launch in 2017. However, to comply with Reserve Bank of India (RBI) regulations mandating separate cities for primary and secondary sites, a third-party colocation site in Bangalore was employed for disaster recovery (DR). Upon the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region in March 2023, Freecharge migrated its disaster recovery (DR) environments for one of its critical applications.

Gupta says, “We reduced our DR costs by around 50 percent by moving out of our colocation site and into the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region, and by simplifying our DR processes.” Furthermore, optimizing DR processes led to a 10−15 percent reduction in administrative time per DR drill, eliminating the need for complex configurations between AWS and the colocation site. “We can now efficiently conduct four routine DR drills annually without disrupting our operations,” adds Gupta.