A mobile money platform was being taken into a new country. A launch has a property that a migration does not: there is no existing system to fall back to, and no production history to tell you how the platform behaves. Whatever is stood up has to be right, and has to be shown to be right, before the first customer transacts.
Financial services · Pacific · delivered 2021
Database platform design for a mobile money launch in a new market
Clustered SQL Server with availability groups, backups, monitoring and tested failover — specified and built so a mobile money service could launch in a new country on a platform that had been proven before it carried traffic.
SQL ServerWindows Server
The problem
What we built
Specified, built, then proven
Operating system and network
Servers built and network configuration applied to a documented specification, so the platform in the new market matches the one it was designed as.
Clustered database servers
SQL Server Enterprise installed on clustered nodes in the primary data centre, on a Windows Server failover cluster, with Microsoft best practice applied to every instance rather than defaults left in place.
High availability
Availability groups configured across the nodes so the loss of a server is survivable without the service stopping.
Backups
Full and transaction log backups configured from the start, which is what makes point-in-time recovery possible rather than theoretical.
Failover testing
Failover exercised and the behaviour confirmed, with support for the client’s own application testing — because the question is whether the service survives, not whether the database does.
Alerting and monitoring
Alerts and monitoring in place before launch, so the first week of production is observed rather than guessed at.
Why testing before launch is the whole point
On a migration you can compare behaviour against the system you are replacing. On a launch there is nothing to compare against, so the only evidence that the platform works is the testing done before it goes live. Backups, monitoring and a rehearsed failover are not finishing touches on that kind of project — they are the deliverable.
How this engagement was run
Delivered as a fixed-price project against written acceptance criteria, to the agreed timeline and without a cost variation. Client not named: the work was done under confidentiality.