Note: In November 2021 LendingHome was rebranded as Kiavi.
Founded in 2013, LendingHome is revolutionizing the world of mortgages to put the power, and the keys, where they belong — in the borrower’s hands. To accomplish that, LendingHome has built an end-to-end mortgage platform that offers a seamless, transparent, and reliable online process for homebuyers, real estate professionals, and investors. They’re doing this with innovative technology and a team of seasoned real estate industry experts.
LendingHome is the fastest growing online mortgage marketplace with more than $2B in mortgage loans originated and $1.3B in principal returned to investors. They’ve been recognized with Fintech 2018 “Best Digital Mortgage Product,” HousingWire 2018 HW TECH100™, Forbes 2018 Fintech 50, and LendIt 2017 “Top Real Estate Platform.” To learn more, go to www.lendinghome.com/.
Financial Services, Marketplace, Real Estate
San Francisco, California
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Improve uptime and flexibility, accelerate innovation, and gain finer-grained control of the cloud environment for security, regions, and cost.
Cloud migration, containers, DevOps, AWS Well-Architected Review
Improved uptime, user experience, internal SLAs, and operations
Improved control and flexibility
Faster performance
Reduced cost
Improved security and compliance
Want to achieve benefits like these? Schedule a free Migration Fast Path Assessment with nClouds to make your journey to AWS fast, productive, and painless.
Working with nClouds to migrate our infrastructure from Heroku to AWS we’ve achieved improved uptime, faster performance, and a more secure environment. And the increased control provided by our new environment is enabling us to innovate faster.”
Director of DevOps and IT, LendingHome
Imagine that your successful, award-winning fintech has reached an inflection point where continued growth and user satisfaction require a fundamental shift to improve scalability and uptime and enable faster innovation. LendingHome recognized they had hit this point.
Key to the success of the brand is the platform’s user experience — for both customers and internal users. In fact, LendingHome is its own biggest user since they created their own mortgage origination system. If the software doesn’t work, their analysts can’t work.
LendingHome engaged with nClouds, an AWS Well-Architected Partner and Premier Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network, to perform an AWS Well-Architected Review based on a set of architectural best practices for reviewing critical workloads running on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
nClouds proposed remediation and worked with LendingHome to develop a proof-of-concept to demonstrate the potential improvements. Then they collaborated on a rapid path to deliver into production.
Donovan says, Before engaging with nClouds [we tried] on our own to tackle this huge project, and we just knew we needed help. So, we contacted [nClouds] and brought them in – I wish we brought them in sooner.”
LendingHome worked with nClouds to migrate their workloads from Heroku to AWS. Instead of using a lift-and-shift cloud migration approach, they used a containerization and DevOps approach. The first step was creating the support infrastructure.
Donovan emphasizes, “It’s really important to think about how you’re going to layer your infrastructure. At the beginning, I highly recommend you do … a comprehensive IP plan … for your entire corporate and production side.”
The new infrastructure uses VPCs as boundaries for its different environments to ensure fine-grained control of their security, regions, and access. There is a single ECS cluster per VPC, with each cluster having at least one root variant. Each variant has six applications comprised of 35 services. The largest variant has six applications consisting of 847 services (not all scaled up), 470 tasks, and 60 ECS hosts - m4.xlarge.
Interested in an AWS Well-Architected Framework Review? Schedule a free AWS Well-Architected Assessment with nClouds to see how you can apply architectural best practices to drive better business outcomes.
Teaming with nClouds, LendingHome moved from an unstable infrastructure on Heroku to a secure, efficient and scalable environment on AWS cloud. The project has yielded numerous benefits:
In the past, Heroku caused significant downtime issues in LendingHome’s production environment. Today, there’s virtually no downtime attributed to their production infrastructure on AWS.
By replacing Heroku with a modular and scalable Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) architecture, LendingHome now has the flexibility to mix and match best of breed applications. Since the migration, they’ve been able to experiment with the encryption of environment variables and how they use load balancers. Donovan says, “[It’s like] you’re playing with Legos, and you can pretty much put it together however it makes sense.”
LendingHome switched from Heroku Postgres to Amazon Aurora Postgres and, as a result, they’ve realized 3.5% faster performance. The Speed Index of LendingHome’s pages was 3.11 before migration and improved to 2.92 post-migration.
By leveraging Spot Instances on AWS, LendingHome can take advantage of spare compute capacity in the AWS cloud available at steep discounts, scaling application throughput up to 10x for the same budget. By simply selecting Spot when launching EC2 instances, they can save up to 90% on On-Demand prices.
LendingHome now has an infrastructure that follows industry best practices, using security building blocks combined with third-party applications like OpenVPN. “Our main priority was to set up VPC boundaries for the different environments in our infrastructure,” says Donovan.
nClouds worked with the LendingHome team to set up private and public routes through a VPN, resulting in better data governance and improved system access. The team also leveraged AWS Lambda to maintain its servers, and AWS CloudFormation to transform their infrastructure into code. With VPC Peering, nClouds was able to create a private virtual network within LendingHome’s infrastructure, allowing them to define what could be exposed publicly.
You can also email us directly at sales@nclouds.com for your inquiries or use the form below
