Key Results
The modernization project delivered tangible benefits:
- Operational Efficiency: Simplified processes for cluster & application service deployments utilizing GitOps, and reduced overhead associated with container registry hosting.
- 30% Cost Reduction: Cost savings achieved by consolidating the number of EKS nodes used.
- Enhanced Visibility: Cloud-native monitoring & logging solutions provides deeper insights, improving analysis & troubleshooting capabilities
- Improved Security: Real-time threat detection, improved approach for Secrets
Management utilizing AWS Secrets Manager, and vulnerability management using Amazon Inspector
About the Client
26 Degrees Global Markets is a Sydney-based multi-asset prime brokerage firm with offices in Tokyo, London, and Cyprus. Their business depends on secure, scalable, and reliable technology infrastructure to deliver innovative financial services to institutional clients worldwide.
The Challenge
The client relied on aging EKS clusters that hosted their critical production workloads, as well as their CI/CD infrastructure. Moreover, the Kubernetes infrastructure was largely unchanged for over two years. All these combined creating several risks:
- Aging infrastructure made cluster management complex and time-consuming.
- Inefficient processes led to higher operational overhead and wasted resources.
- Risk of service disruptions threatened reliability and client trust.
- Rising costs from outdated systems increased financial pressure.
Our Solution
The client had already been leveraging AWS as their cloud infrastructure provider for many years and as early adopters of Kubernetes, they initially deployed self-hosted Kubernetes clusters on Amazon EC2 instances prior to the introduction of Amazon EKS.
Given clients long-standing familiarity with AWS services, continuing to build and enhance their Kubernetes environment by utilizing Amazon EKS was a logical choice.
Our team implemented a comprehensive modernization program across four key areas:
1. Automation & Scalability
- Deployed new EKS environments with Infrastructure as Code using Terraform.
- Adopted GitOps practices with ArgoCD for automated, streamlined deployments.
- Introduced auto-scaling spot instance node groups to optimize non-production workloads.
2. Security Enhancement
- Integrated Istio service mesh for observability, traffic control, and security.
- Added Amazon Inspector for vulnerability scanning across workloads.
- Implemented runtime security tooling to detect abnormal behavior and compliance violations.
- Improved secrets management with AWS Secrets Manager-backed Kubernetes secrets.
3. Simplified Access & Governance
- Enabled Single Sign-On (SSO) for secure and simplified cluster access.
- Enhanced IAM control using IAM Roles for Service Accounts and Pod Identity for fine-grained workload permissions.
4. Visibility & Monitoring
- Migrated to Amazon ECR from a self-hosted registry, reducing complexity.
- Deployed Amazon OpenSearch Service for log analysis.
- Adopted cloud-native monitoring solutions to improve observability and troubleshooting.
From infrastructure automation to cost optimization and security enhancements, the modernization covered every layer of 26 Degrees’ Kubernetes environment, delivering a stable foundation for growth.
Impact of our Work
The modernization project streamlined 26 Degrees’ Kubernetes environment, delivering 30% cost savings, improved security, and simplified operations. Automation with GitOps and Terraform, combined with cloud-native monitoring, Istio, and AWS security tools, provided better visibility, reduced overhead, and a scalable, reliable foundation for global financial services.
