Migration & Modernization
How NTT DATA Payments achieved 88% faster feature rollouts and 99.99% availability with AWS ModAx
NTT DATA Payment Services Group of Companies is a leading payment solutions provider in Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. With a vast footprint of over 500,000 payment touchpoints and 30 years of expertise, NTT DATA Payment Services empowers businesses by offering comprehensive online and offline payment solutions tailored to meet the diverse needs of SMEs and enterprises.
As a wholly owned subsidiary of NTT DATA Japan, one of the top 10 global IT service providers, NTT DATA Payment Services is committed to driving sustainable commerce modernization. Their mission is to drive their clients’ growth by providing sustainable & tailored commerce solutions as a trusted partner.
NTT DATA Payment Services’ Loyalty Application, a solution for accruing and redeeming loyalty points, plays a pivotal role in the company’s customer engagement strategy. As NTT DATA Payment Services rapidly expanded, the Loyalty Application’s monolithic architecture built with ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server database on-premises began to struggle under the weight of new demands. The system faced challenges related to scalability, availability, agility, and rising operational costs affecting customer satisfaction.
In this post, you’ll learn how NTT DATA Payment Services leveraged AWS Modernization Experience Based Acceleration (ModAx) to accelerate the modernization of their loyalty application from a monolith to a microservice architecture using cloud native services.
Transforming the Loyalty Application through ModAx
AWS Experience-Based Acceleration (EBA) is an outcome-focused transformation methodology that helps organizations accelerate their cloud journey with an emphasis on cross-functional collaboration, and hands-on learning. EBA is the methodology that underpins ModAx, which combines an assess, plan & architect phase followed by a build & prove phase to develop modernization muscle within teams.
For the modernization of NTT DATA Payment Services’ loyalty system, AWS collaborated with NTT DATA Payment Services on an in-depth discovery and assessment of the application to understand both business and technical requirements, as well as the current state. The strategy was to decompose the monolithic application into microservices to enhance scalability and performance. Using domain-driven design (DDD), AWS collaborated with NTT DATA Payment Services to identify business domains and map them to microservices. Through event storming and context mapping exercises, we defined Bounded Contexts (clearly defined boundary around a specific business domain) and Aggregates (collection of related data that must be managed and updated together) to establish distinct microservice boundaries, each handling specific business functionality.
Figure 1: The ModAx process followed at NTT DATA Payments
Using the above assessment approach, we identified six core services – Card Account service, Card Issuer service, Campaign service, Transaction service, Product service & Merchant service. The shared supporting services include Reporting service, Notification service & Email service.
Figure 2: The core and shared microservices identified in the Loyalty application
Leveraging Modernization Pathways
Modernization Pathways provide a strategic framework that guides the selection of appropriate AWS services and architectural patterns. It enables the transformation of a
monolithic application into a scalable, cloud-native microservices solution, while addressing its business and technical drivers.
While the ModAx framework helped identify the microservices architecture, the AWS modernization pathways guided the target architecture design.
Figure 3: AWS Modernization Pathways
This modernization pathways framework empowered NTT DATA Payment Services to select from tailored approaches— “Move to Cloud Native,” “Move to Modern DevOps,” and “Move to Managed Databases”— each chosen to address distinct business drivers. Specifically, the “Move to Cloud Native” pathway was adopted to harness AWS managed services for enhanced scalability and operational efficiency; “Move to Modern DevOps” was selected to integrate modern DevOps practices and move to modern operations with automated pipeline deployment; and “Move to Managed Databases” was pursued to offload the burden of server management and optimize performance. This targeted modernization strategy and target architecture not only resolved immediate operational challenges but also laid a robust foundation for sustained growth and innovation.
Solution Overview
NTT DATA Payment Services embarked on their loyalty application modernization by first modernizing the Product and Campaign microservices during a three day hands-on ModAx workshop. This implementation validated the target architecture while achieving the objectives established during the assess, plan, and architect phase. The modernization was guided by three AWS modernization pathways – “Move to Modern DevOps”, “Move to Cloud Native”, and “Move to Managed Databases” – each addressing specific business and technical requirements. This targeted approach transformed the monolithic application into a scalable, cloud-native solution while delivering measurable business value.
Figure 4: Target Architecture on AWS
Move to Modern DevOps Pathway
To start with, the “Move to Modern DevOps” pathway was leveraged to establish automated CI/CD pipelines for the Loyalty application, accelerating software delivery and reducing operational risk. The solution integrated GitLab for version control, AWS CodeBuild for application building and testing, AWS CodePipeline for orchestration, and AWS CloudFormation for infrastructure as code, enabling deployments with automated testing and validation.
Move to Cloud Native Pathway
Next, we leveraged the “Move to Cloud Native” pathway with AWS Lambda as the core compute service to support the Product and Campaign services, replacing traditional server-based infrastructure. This serverless approach addressed the application’s distinct peak and off-peak usage patterns, with traffic typically dropping to minimal levels from midnight to early morning, while enabling independent scaling of core business services. AWS Lambda’s demand-based automatic scaling and pay-per-use pricing model eliminated the cost of maintaining idle servers during low-traffic periods while ensuring rapid scaling during peak hours, with each microservice function scaling independently based on its specific demand patterns.
The cloud-native implementation extended to asynchronous batch processing using AWS Step Functions combined with AWS Batch and AWS Fargate (Amazon Elastic Container Service) to handle long-running processes, such as processing large batches of SKUs during new customer onboarding. This serverless container execution model eliminated server management complexity while providing automatic resource scaling.
Internal messaging and user notification needs were addressed by deploying Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) with a publish-subscribe model and Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) for external communication, including transactional emails and user notifications.
Amazon API Gateway was implemented to handle API request routing, rate limiting, and policy enforcement, creating a fully managed API layer. For observability, Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray were incorporated to help debug and analyze the application performance.
Move to Managed Databases Pathway
Finally, the “Move to Managed Databases” pathway addressed the organization’s goal to eliminate database administration overhead while optimizing performance. Using AWS Schema Conversion Tool (AWS SCT) , the technical assessment identified opportunities to separate business logic from the database layer, leading to the selection of Amazon DynamoDB as the optimal database solution. Amazon DynamoDB was chosen for its serverless nature, consistent low latency, and seamless integration with AWS Lambda. The combination creates an efficient, cost-effective solution that automatically scales with varying workloads while maintaining high performance and eliminating database licensing costs. This managed database approach eliminated the need for database patching, backup management, and capacity planning, allowing the development team to focus on application logic rather than infrastructure maintenance.
Key Achievements & Business Outcomes
NTT DATA Payment Services achieved the following outcomes by modernizing the Product and Campaign services on AWS
- The time required for new feature rollouts decreased by 88%, going from an average of 8 weeks to just 1 week.
- The application has been architected to improve transaction capacity by 5x times, processing 500,000 transactions per minute, compared to the previous 100,000 transactions per minute.
- Service restoration time was reduced by 67%, improving from 6 hours to less than 2 hours through enhanced traceability and automated monitoring.
- Availability improved from 90% to 99.99% through implementing a resilient cloud-native architecture on AWS, through a combination of serverless components and microservices architecture.
Conclusion
The modernization of NTT DATA Payment Services’ Loyalty Application with AWS ModAx EBA exemplifies how businesses can overcome legacy system challenges through cloud-native solutions. The shift from a monolithic architecture to microservices enhanced scalability and improved performance, availability, and agility. AWS ModAx enabled NTT DATA Payment Services to accelerate time-to-market, enhance customer engagement, and drive tangible business outcomes. The experience-based approach empowered NTT DATA Payment Services’ teams with hands-on expertise and modernization capabilities that will support future growth and innovation.
Get started with ModAx
Ready to get started on your modernization journey? If your organization is facing similar challenges with outdated systems or struggling to keep up with market demands, AWS ModAx EBA can be the key to unlocking the next phase of your digital transformation journey. Learn more about AWS ModAx EBA today and explore how it can help your business modernize faster, better, and smarter. Get in touch with your AWS account team to learn more about ModAx and how it can help you accelerate your cloud journey. New to the cloud? Contact AWS Sales to get started with transforming your business.