Building a portable tech stack for rapid deployment using AWS with Thndr

To support its regional expansion goals, Thndr wanted to enter new markets without making major changes to its codebase, while meeting the strict regulatory and connectivity requirements of local financial authorities. Launching in the UAE required a secure, low-latency solution that was auditable, compliant, and aligned with the requirements of local securities exchanges.

Thndr had already designed its applications and containerized architecture with portability in mind. The team imagined a “build-once, deploy anywhere” model that would use a single codebase and the same containers that powered its on-premises solution in Egypt. That approach would let the company replicate environments quickly, accelerating deployment in new regions without rebuilding core systems.

With the portable architecture already in place, Thndr needed a cloud provider that could reliably and compliantly support its deployment in a new region. The company selected AWS for its ability to provide scalable, highly available, and secure infrastructure for rapid multiregion expansion.

Working alongside AWS, Thndr replicated its on-premises architecture in a portable and configurable infrastructure-as-code deployment model. Designed for rapid implementation, the model uses containerized microservices that run on Kubernetes. Thndr uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)—a service for building, running, and scaling production-ready Kubernetes applications—as the control plane for its containerized microservices, providing a consistent and automated way to manage workload scheduling, service discovery, and rollout strategies across environments. Amazon EKS handles the Kubernetes management overhead—such as control plane availability, cluster upgrades, and security patching—which empowers Thndr’s engineering teams to focus on application logic. Using Amazon EKS, Thndr can apply standardized configurations through infrastructure-as-code, use unified deployment patterns, and integrate native AWS capabilities—such as load balancing, autoscaling, and IAM-based authentication—to maintain performance and secure operations during peak demand.

To strengthen data durability, Thndr uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)—an object storage service—for resilient, highly available object storage, as well as Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), an easy-to-manage relational database service with built-in automation. To improve operational efficiency, the company adopts additional managed infrastructure components, including Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR)—a fully managed container registry—for secure, scalable container image storage and life cycle management.

A critical requirement for operating in the UAE was achieving low-latency, dedicated connectivity to securities exchanges. Thndr and AWS established secure, private network links using AWS Direct Connect, which creates a dedicated network connection to AWS. This helped improve application performance while protecting Thndr’s sensitive data. Using AWS Direct Connect alongside Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to define and launch AWS resources and AWS PrivateLink to establish connectivity between VPCs and AWS services without exposing data to the internet helps Thndr meet regulatory requirements for the UAE.

“Using AWS, we were easily able to achieve separation at the network level for satisfying the securities exchanges’ compliance controls,” says Farouk.

Using the portable, infrastructure-as-code deployment model, Thndr launched its solution in the UAE within 2 weeks—a significant reduction compared to the 1.5–2 months required to set up on-premises infrastructure. The accelerated timeline demonstrated the rapid deployment capabilities of Thndr’s configurable solution. “Using infrastructure as code on AWS made a very fast launch possible,” says Farouk. “In less than 2 weeks, a team of three people had our testing, staging, and production environments up and running.”

Thndr is working to implement generative AI in its customer support and wealth advisory service and is experimenting with different foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service for building generative AI applications and agents at production scale. The company is using a tool-based architecture with prompt engineering and an FAQ-driven knowledge base to provide fast, accurate responses to customers across multiple channels. And because Thndr is using regionally hosted infrastructure, the solution is compliant with local regulatory requirements. Thndr is also piloting identity automation by adopting AWS AI services—using Amazon Rekognition to detect real users during facial verification and Amazon Textract to automatically extract text, handwriting, layout elements, and data for scanned documents.