Reducing Operational Costs by 50% While Increasing Performance Using Amazon Aurora with 10x Banking

Based in the United Kingdom, 10x offers client banks and providers of financial services its cloud-native banking solution, SuperCore, worldwide. Using the software-as-a-service solution, 10x’s clients can provide timely and relevant insights to help users better manage their money in a digitally connected world.

For SuperCore, 10x stores a large volume of customer transaction data in its database, such as mortgage payments and credit card charges. There is no room for error because users expect their banking software to work correctly all the time. 10x had been using AWS services since its founding in 2016, but the company managed its database using a different provider. In July 2021, 10x started exploring the options for migrating its database to Aurora when its legacy distributed SQL database could no longer meet the company’s needs for functionality, performance, and resilience. 10x chose Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition because the managed service would off-load the heavy lifting and be more reliable, high performing, and cost efficient.

Starting in September 2021, 10x began the complex migration. The company needed to complete the migration incrementally so that its customers with live production environments wouldn’t experience unplanned downtime or lose data. Throughout the migration, 10x received support from AWS, including help planning out the architecture as well as performance tuning of the company’s extract and load tooling. By January 2023, 10x completed the migration, which consisted of over 900 individual services across 22 environments for both 10x and its customers. In total, the company migrated 25 TB of data to Aurora PostgreSQL with 100 percent accuracy across all the environments. “Our experience with support from AWS has been great,” says Brendan Twomey, director of platform at 10x. “AWS has a huge wealth of experience, and there are a lot of people who we can draw in to help solve problems.”

Previously, 10x experienced volatility during version upgrades, requiring its data engineering team to invest significant time in troubleshooting errors and installing frequent patches. Using Aurora PostgreSQL, 10x spends less time managing the infrastructure and reduces the overall cost of ownership. With its latest upgrade, 10x didn’t experience a single issue. “Before the migration, the data engineering team spent the majority of its time making sure the legacy distributed SQL database continued to function on a daily basis,” says Twomey. “By migrating to Aurora PostgreSQL, a stable system-managed service, the team can now start fulfilling its real function, which is to drive the right data hygiene, management, and administration across the organization and our solution.”

10x’s data engineering team also saves time because it can reference metrics and data about what’s happening in the database to work more effectively. With the overall time savings, 10x reduces the operational overhead by two-thirds and can shift the workloads of three to four data engineers to more meaningful tasks that impact customers every year. “Aurora PostgreSQL is much lighter touch,” says Twomey. “Having the managed service is great for us. It helps take the toil away from the teams so that we can scale.”

By migrating to Aurora PostgreSQL, 10x significantly reduced costs for both the company and its customers that incur the cost of the database. For 10x and its customers, the overall operating cost of the database is 50 percent less compared with the cost of the company’s previous distributed SQL database. 10x achieves these cost savings because Aurora PostgreSQL can run more efficiently. “Using Aurora PostgreSQL reduces the operating cost of our solution overall, which means we can reach a bigger and wider target market globally,” says Twomey. “As we lower our cost profile, we can remove barriers to entering additional markets so that we can add more value globally.”

10x’s customers benefit from the migration as well because they have access to a solution that is fast, reliable, and resilient. “After we migrated to Aurora PostgreSQL, the latency became six times lower, and we see much less variability,” says Dan Massie, senior principal engineer at 10x. “Ultimately, it means that every customer is getting a much better experience.” Using Amazon RDS Proxy—a fully managed, highly available database proxy for Amazon RDS that makes applications more scalable, resilient, and secure—10x achieves fast failover for its solution so that customers don’t experience delays.