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Case study: HONK Technologies
HONK Modernised Payments Infrastructure on a Phased Serverless Path
A hybrid on-prem and EC2 estate could not keep up with HONK's growth or compliance roadmap. Pilotcore guided a phased migration to AWS ECS, Fargate, and Terraform with the internal team owning the result.
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Sector
Fintech, payments
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Engagement
Phased serverless migration
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Stack
AWS ECS, Fargate, Terraform
Challenge
A hybrid estate was holding payments delivery back.
HONK is a mobile parking and payments leader. The hybrid on-prem and EC2 setup was limiting scalability and compliance progress.
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Limited scalability.
The hybrid setup struggled to handle the dynamic needs of a growing business.
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Operational inefficiencies.
The team could not adapt quickly to changing demand, which slowed delivery.
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Compliance pressure.
Meeting SOC and PCI-DSS expectations was critical for the payments roadmap.
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Sluggish application delivery.
Deployment speed lagged behind the cadence the product roadmap needed.
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Resource-intensive management.
Engineering time was spent maintaining infrastructure instead of shipping features.
Approach
A phased migration that respected the production estate.
After a detailed analysis we built a phased serverless strategy on AWS, with feedback loops at every stage so scope stayed aligned with HONK's priorities.
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In-depth discovery.
Worked with HONK's team to surface pain points, growth plans, and operational constraints.
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Infrastructure analysis.
Mapped the bottlenecks in the hybrid setup and the cost of staying with it.
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Compliance review.
Reviewed SOC and PCI-DSS expectations so the new design could meet them.
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Solution design.
Designed a serverless approach on AWS ECS and Fargate to scale predictably.
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Migration planning.
Built a phased roadmap with Terraform so infrastructure stayed reproducible.
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Team training.
Trained HONK engineers on the new serverless and DevOps practices alongside the migration.
Solution
AWS-native foundations the internal team can keep extending.
Migration centred on AWS ECS and Fargate, with infrastructure as code, security baselines, and CI/CD that HONK's engineers own end to end.
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Serverless migration.
Moved applications to AWS ECS and Fargate, removing EC2 patching and capacity work.
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Infrastructure as code.
Standardised on Terraform so every environment was reproducible and reviewable.
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Security baseline.
Deployed IAM Identity Center and GuardDuty for centralised access and threat detection.
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CI/CD automation.
Built pipelines that ship updates quickly and safely with rollback paths.
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Monitoring and logging.
Wired up AWS native tooling for real-time performance and incident signal.
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Compliance readiness.
Configured controls aligned with SOC and PCI-DSS evidence expectations.
Outcomes
Observed improvements during the engagement.
Outcomes reflect operational improvements observed during the engagement window. Results depend on baseline architecture, team process, and workload profile.
i. Scalability
Outcome 01
Auto-scaling that absorbs peak demand.
Workloads scale automatically so peak-hour traffic does not require manual intervention or pre-warmed capacity.
ii. Security
Outcome 02
Stronger SOC and PCI-DSS posture.
Improved readiness for SOC 2 and PCI-DSS control expectations through centralised identity, audit, and threat detection.
iii. Operations
Outcome 03
Faster, more reliable deployments.
Automated CI/CD reduced deployment time and removed manual steps that previously caused incidents.
iv. Cost
Outcome 04
Lower infrastructure overhead.
Removing EC2 management reduced ongoing operational effort and cost pressure on the platform team.
v. Reliability
Outcome 05
Improved platform stability.
Reduced downtime during critical periods through better isolation, observability, and automated remediation.
vi. Velocity
Outcome 06
Capacity freed for new features.
Time previously spent on infrastructure now goes toward customer-facing feature work.
In their words
What HONK said about the engagement.
Client testimonial
“The cloud migration was a success and did not impact production operations. Infrastructure is now managed via code, and the internal development team was empowered to extend and add to the code base.”
Tony La, CTO, HONK Technologies
Next step
Exploring a Similar Infrastructure Transition?
See how a phased serverless transition can reduce operational friction and improve delivery resilience in your environment.