Real Results for Real Companies.

The Challenge

HitchPay, a fast-growing African payment processor, was experiencing rapid transaction growth that was outpacing its cloud infrastructure. Their AWS environment had been provisioned reactively over two years, resulting in over-provisioned EC2 instances, unoptimized database configurations, and a monthly cloud bill that was growing 30% faster than revenue. With plans to expand into three new West African markets, they needed infrastructure that could handle $2M+ in monthly transactions processed while maintaining PCI-DSS compliance and sub-10ms payment processing latency.

Our Approach

ApexStack Cloud embedded a team of three cloud architects and two SRE engineers with HitchPay's infrastructure team for a 16-week engagement. We began with a comprehensive infrastructure audit, mapping every workload, data flow, and cost center across their AWS estate.

• Migrated payment processing workloads from EC2 to AWS EKS with auto-scaling pod configurations tuned for transaction volume patterns
• Redesigned the database layer with Aurora PostgreSQL read replicas and connection pooling, eliminating the single-database bottleneck
• Implemented a FinOps framework with real-time cost dashboards, reserved instance planning, and automated rightsizing recommendations
• Built a PCI-DSS compliant CI/CD pipeline with automated security scanning, secret management via AWS Secrets Manager, and immutable infrastructure deployments
• Established a multi-region disaster recovery architecture with RPO under 15 minutes and RTO under 30 minutes

Tech Stack

Results

Within four months, HitchPay's monthly AWS spend dropped while simultaneously scaling to handle $2M+ in transactions processed. Payment processing latency improved from 45ms to under 8ms. The new infrastructure passed a full PCI-DSS Level 1 audit on the first attempt, and the FinOps dashboards gave HitchPay's finance team real-time visibility into cost allocation by product line for the first time.