Founded in 2018, XCLAIM is revolutionizing the bankruptcy claims market by aggregating all US bankruptcy claims into a single centralized marketplace. Bankruptcy claims are unpaid receivables to vendors, suppliers, landlords, employees, and other creditors. Rather than wait years for the bankruptcy court processes to issue payment distributions, creditors can sell their claim to interested buyers. Last year, more than $400 billion of bankruptcy claims were traded.
XCLAIM’s platform is the first of its kind to enable digital trading of bankruptcy claims at scale. The company’s mission is to maximize value and empower all stakeholders in the claims trading ecosystem by digitally enhancing the efficiency and transparency of today’s bankruptcy trading markets. For more information about XCLAIM, go to: x-claim.com
Financial Exchanges, Financial Services, fintech, Legal Tech
Los Angeles, CA
Modernize its AWS infrastructure for faster time-to-market and improved operational efficiency.
AWS Well-Architected Framework Review, DevOps Services, Security
High availability and scalability
Enhanced fault tolerance
Automation for faster time-to-market and operational efficiency
Want to achieve benefits like these? Schedule a free Application Modernization Assessment with nClouds to learn how to build sustainable systems for delivering better software faster.
nClouds is very responsive to our needs and is a valuable extension of our team. I appreciate their clear communication of tasks and timing for their ongoing DevOps support of XCLAIM’s infrastructure on AWS."
Co-Founder & CTO, XCLAIM
To support the fast growth of this startup company, XCLAIM needed a modern infrastructure with increased automation to deploy new features faster and improve operational efficiency.
XCLAIM’S Chief Technology Officer (CTO) valued his previous experience with nClouds when he worked at another nClouds customer. He asked nClouds to perform an AWS Well-Architected Framework Review, which identified remediations required to achieve best practices. nClouds then was engaged to make those remediations.
As an early-stage startup, XCLAIM initially used nClouds for small projects, such as improving its Amazon ECS-based compute platform. XCLAIM also contracted with nClouds to provide ongoing support of its DevOps roadmap. As the company grew, it expanded nClouds’ engagement.
Applying AWS Well-Architected Framework best practices guidance, nClouds improved the existing Amazon ECS-based compute platform. AWS Auto Scaling now adjusts capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance, and AWS services are deployed across two AZs for high availability, fault tolerance, and scalability.
nClouds performed infrastructure buildout using CloudFormation templates to deploy the initial resources: subnets, route tables, security groups, internet gateways, NAT gateways, and peering connections. The templates connected a new environment VPC to the management VPC, with an OpenVPN server to provide a secure and private way to access resources.
After creating the initial resources, CloudFormation templates deployed the necessary resources to run the applications, with one task definition and Amazon ECS service for each application. All services run in a single Amazon ECS cluster. Four proprietary XCLAIM applications were deployed.
Task definitions specify how containers should be provisioned including memory and CPU requirements, Docker repository and images, shared data volumes, and how the containers connect to each other. Every task definition is composed of the image built with the client-provided application. Images are stored and updated in Amazon ECR. A Datadog Docker image and a Fluent Bit Docker image provide the ability to ship the application logs. The application is then enabled to communicate with the database launched in Amazon RDS.
nClouds developed a fully automated CI/CD pipeline in AWS CodePipeline with three stages. The first stage pulls the application code from a GitHub repository. The second stage builds the application image and pushes it to Amazon ECR. The third stage grabs the latest application image and deploys it to the Amazon ECS cluster. All the services pull parameters from AWS Secrets Manager and AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store to keep sensitive data safe. AWS WAF secures the application layer by protecting web-facing applications from DDoS attacks.
For production only, a CloudFormation template deploys the Amazon Redshift cluster. XCLAIM, with the aid of business intelligence software Looker, explores, analyzes and shares real-time business analytics. To populate the Amazon Redshift cluster, conduct schema transformation, and save data integrity, a migration task deploys to migrate data from the Amazon RDS instance to the Amazon Redshift cluster.
nClouds also created a temporary environment for customer demos and testing. A single Amazon ECS service is used within the temporary environment, containing a single task running the four applications and the database within it.
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.
XCLAIM’s roadmap of innovations, digital efficiencies, and partnering with nClouds’ talented engineers is a textbook win-win scenario for both companies. The project has yielded numerous benefits to XCLAIM:
A successful production environment requires database systems that are always available, have minimal if any planned outages, and scale quickly and easily as business requirements change. AWS Auto Scaling automatically adjusts capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance. Amazon ECS provides highly scalable, high-performance container orchestration. Amazon ElastiCache for Redis improves availability, reliability, scalability, security, and performance. Amazon Route 53 provides a highly available and scalable way to route XCLAIM’s end users to internet applications. Amazon EC2 provides secure, resizable compute capacity. AWS WAF protects XCLAIM against common web exploits that may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources.
Fault tolerance is a feature that enables a system to continue with its operations even when there is a failure in one part of the system. AWS services deploy across two AZs for high availability, fault tolerance, and scalability. Amazon S3 stores objects redundantly on multiple devices across multiple facilities in an AWS Region. So even in the rare case of a failure in an AWS data center, XCLAIM still has access to its data. AWS ALB is inherently fault-tolerant because it detects unhealthy instances within the pool of EC2 instances and automatically reroutes traffic to healthy instances. AWS Lambda has built-in availability and fault tolerance. Amazon DynamoDB’s point-in-time recovery (PITR) provides continuous backups of DynamoDB table data. With a single click in the AWS Management Console or a single API, it can restore that table to any point in time up to the second during the preceding 35 days.
Automated deployment improves productivity and reduces errors to eliminate rework, wait times, and the business impact of failures in production. AWS CodePipeline helps XCLAIM rapidly and reliably deliver features and infrastructure updates. AWS CodeBuild scales continuously and processes multiple builds concurrently, so builds are not left waiting in a queue. AWS Lambda automatically runs code without requiring XCLAIM to provision or manage servers and automatically scales applications by running code in response to triggers. CloudFormation automates operations. CloudWatch automates the monitoring of cloud resources and applications. CloudTrail automatically records and stores event logs. Auto Scaling automatically adjusts capacity. Temporary environments are automatically created or deleted using Slack integration.
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