Automating a Global Forex Trading Platform in Just 11 Days
70% cost reduction with full infrastructure automation — from SSH deployments to GitOps.
The challenge
A forex trading platform serving institutional clients across three continents was running entirely on manually provisioned infrastructure. Every deployment required SSH access to production servers. Configuration changes were made in-place without version control. There was no disaster recovery plan beyond ad-hoc database backups. The company had attempted to modernize twice before, both times abandoning the effort after months of slow progress.
The platform processed over $200 million in daily trading volume, making downtime extremely costly. Yet the manual deployment process meant that every release carried significant risk. The engineering team had developed an informal rule: deploy only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, never after 2 PM, and always have two senior engineers on standby. The Google DORA 2024 Report classifies this kind of deployment cadence as among the lowest-performing tiers — elite performers deploy multiple times per day and recover in under one hour.
The 11-day sprint
Nepheli took a fundamentally different approach: rather than a gradual migration, we executed a complete infrastructure automation sprint in 11 working days. The key insight was that the platform's architecture was not complex — it was just uncodified. The IaC market is projected to grow from $1.32 billion in 2025 to $9.40 billion by 2034 according to Precedence Research, reflecting the industry-wide shift toward codified infrastructure — but many organizations still have not made the transition.
Using Terraform for infrastructure-as-code and ArgoCD for GitOps-based deployment, we codified the entire production environment: VPCs, load balancers, application servers, database replicas, caching layers, monitoring dashboards, and alerting rules. GitOps adoption has reached 64 percent across the industry, with 81 percent of adopters reporting higher infrastructure reliability and faster rollback. Every resource was defined in version-controlled code, reviewable through pull requests, and reproducible from scratch.
Zero-downtime cutover
The cutover from the old environment to the new was executed during a pre-planned maintenance window with a full rollback plan. DNS-based traffic shifting allowed us to route a small percentage of traffic to the new infrastructure first, verify correct behavior, and then complete the migration. The entire cutover took 45 minutes, with zero trading disruption.
The results
Infrastructure costs decreased by 70 percent through right-sizing, reserved instance optimization, and the elimination of oversized instances that had been provisioned as insurance against the unreliability of the manual process. Flexera's data shows that organizations with no optimization plan overspend by up to 70 percent — this engagement was a textbook example of the knowledge-graph-driven cost optimization approach Nepheli applies.
The platform's engineering team now deploys to production multiple times per day through pull requests rather than SSH sessions — consistent with research showing that GitOps adoption increases deployment frequency by 2x to 5x within three months. The informal deployment rules were retired. Deployment-related incidents dropped to zero in the first three months post-migration, and the disaster recovery capability — nonexistent before the engagement — now supports a tested recovery time objective of under 30 minutes. With enterprise downtime costing $100K to $1M+ per hour according to New Relic, the risk reduction alone justified the engagement.