Real-Time Payment Processing on AWS | Rewards360 Case Study

Introduction:

Rewards 360 (R360) is a specialized payment processing and card rewards management platform serving banks, NBFCs, and card issuers across India and South-East Asia. Operating as a critical real-time payment processor, R360 scaled to over 12 million card transactions monthly. The iShop platform is a customer-facing rewards and shopping portal serving millions of ICICI Bank customers. Legacy infrastructure constraints — including payment settlement latencies exceeding 200ms, inability to scale during festive season traffic spikes, and PCI-DSS / RBI compliance risks — drove the decision to modernize on AWS.

Client:

Rewards 360 Pvt. Ltd

Industry:

Financial Services — Payments / Card Issuer Payment Processing 

Offering:

24/7 Managed Services & Consulting

AWS Services:

1. Amazon EC2
2. Application Load Balancer (ALB)
3. Auto Scaling Groups
4. Amazon ECS on EC2
5. AWS CodePipeline
6. AWS CodeBuild
7. Amazon CloudWatch
8. AWS X-Ray
9. Amazon S3
10. Amazon RDS (Aurora)
11. AWS IAM
12. AWS Secrets Manager
13. AWS Systems Manager (SSM)
14. NAT Gateway
15. Amazon VPC

The Challenge:

 R360’s iShop platform was running on a rigid, manually managed infrastructure that could not keep pace with growing digital traffic and promotional campaign spikes. The core challenges were: 

• The platform could not automatically scale during high-traffic promotional events, causing slowdowns and poor customer experience for millions of ICICI Bank customers 

• Every deployment required manual steps by the operations team — a slow, error-prone process that increased the risk of outages and delayed feature releases 

• The frontend and backend were tightly coupled on shared infrastructure, meaning a failure in one component could bring down the entire platform 

• The infrastructure did not fully align with FSI security and compliance standards, creating potential audit findings and regulatory exposure 

• Engineering teams were consumed by manual patching, deployments, and incident firefighting — leaving little bandwidth for innovation 

The Solution: Strategic Implementations

 Rapyder redesigned and delivered a fully modernized, cloud-native AWS infrastructure for iShop — built on three core principles: scale automatically, deploy safely, and stay secure: 

• Auto-Scaling Frontend on EC2:

  The Angular-based frontend deployed on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer with Auto Scaling Groups — automatically adding or removing servers based on live traffic, ensuring performance during busy promotional periods. Pre-built EC2 AMIs are plugged directly into the deployment pipeline 

• Containerized Backend on Amazon ECS:

  Backend microservices migrated to independent containers on Amazon ECS — each service can be scaled, updated, or fixed in isolation without impacting the rest of the platform. All sensitive credentials stored in AWS Secrets Manager, never hardcoded 

• Fully Automated CI/CD Pipeline:

  GitHub connected to AWS CodePipeline triggers automatic build and deployment on every code commit. CodeBuild handles compilation and testing. Separate pipelines for frontend and backend ensure changes in one area never accidentally affect the other 

• Monitoring and Observability:

  Amazon CloudWatch tracks all key metrics and sends alerts on anomalies. Logs automatically stored in CloudWatch Logs with optional S3 archival. AWS X-Ray enables distributed tracing across microservices for rapid performance diagnosis 

• FSI-Grade Security Architecture:

  Frontend and backend run in private subnets with NAT Gateway for outbound access only. IAM roles configured with least-privilege access for every service. Data encrypted at rest and in transit using SSL/TLS. EC2 patching and OS hardening automated via AWS Systems Manager (SSM) and AMI lifecycle pipelines 

Technical Impact:

The Business Impact:  Impact Engineered by Rapyder

The solutions delivered measurable operational and strategic benefits to customer:

• Scalable Architecture:

  iShop now handles peak traffic during reward campaigns without any manual intervention — directly protecting customer experience during high-value ICICI Bank promotional events 

• Automated CI/CD:

  Deployments happen automatically, faster, and with significantly fewer errors — compressing release cycles and enabling the team to ship new features with confidence 

• Better Reliability:

  Fault isolation between frontend and backend means issues stay contained, auto-recovery kicks in quickly, and platform-wide outages are eliminated 

• FSI-Grade Security & Compliance:

  All data encrypted, access tightly controlled, and the setup meets banking-grade compliance requirements — reducing audit risk for both R360 and ICICI Bank 

• Reduced Operational Overhead:

  Containerized workloads on ECS and automated patching via SSM dramatically reduce the number of servers and manual tasks the team manages — freeing engineering bandwidth for product innovation 

• Payment Processing Scale:

  Platform now reliably supports over 12 million card transactions monthly with sub-100ms payment settlement, 99.99% uptime SLA, and the capacity to onboard new card issuer clients at scale