Question

a multinational corporate and investment bank is regularly processing steady workloads of accruals, loan interests, and other critical financial calculations every night from 10 pm to 3 am on their on-premises data center for their corporate clients. once the process is done, the results are then uploaded to the oracle general ledger which means that the processing should not be delayed or interrupted. the cto has decided to move its it infrastructure to aws to save costs. the company needs to reserve compute capacity in a specific availability zone to properly run their workloads. as the senior solutions architect, how can you implement a cost-effective architecture in aws for their financial system?

Answer 1

To create a cost-effective AWS architecture for the financial system, use Reserved Instances, Amazon RDS for Oracle with Multi-AZ deployments, AWS Step Functions for process automation, CloudWatch for monitoring, and S3 for data storage while ensuring capacity reservations in a specific Availability Zone.

Step-by-step explanation:

As the senior solutions architect for the multinational corporate and investment bank moving to AWS, you will need to ensure a cost-effective architecture that provides the required compute capacity during the bank's nightly processing window. For compute capacity, AWS offers Reserved Instances, which allow you to reserve capacity for your workloads at a discounted rate compared to On-Demand pricing. To ensure the reserved capacity is in a specific Availability Zone, you would purchase Reserved Instances in that zone, which guarantees capacity and provides significant cost savings over On-Demand instances.

In addition, to manage costs effectively, consider using Amazon RDS for Oracle as a fully managed database service to simplify database setup, operation, and scaling. To maintain high availability and data durability, you should deploy the database across multiple Availability Zones, taking advantage of Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments. For workload automation, AWS Step Functions could orchestrate the financial processing workflows reliably and ensure that they complete within the required timeframe for uploading to the Oracle general ledger. Additionally, AWS services such as CloudWatch for monitoring and S3 for data storage could complement the architecture for data management and operational insights.

Summarizing, use Reserved Instances for compute capacity with preferred Availability Zone reservations, RDS Multi-AZ for database management, Step Functions for workflow automation, CloudWatch for monitoring, and S3 for data storage to create a cost-effective and reliable infrastructure on AWS for the financial system.