A2IM Robotadvisors Story

A2IM-Robotavisors is a dynamic software startup specializing in designing, developing, and maintaining AI-powered corporate software. Their solutions span multiple sectors, including financial services, logistics, healthcare, and e-government. The financial industry focuses on enabling financial planners to assist clients with wealth allocation, financial planning, savings optimization, and retirement planning. Currently, they are building a platform for automated decision-making, with three essential products in production: Golem Robot Trader, Golem Robot Advisor, and Golem Logistics.

We spoke with Driss Lamrani, CEO of A2IM-Robotadvisors, about their implementation of Ambassador’s Edge Stack API Gateway and how it has supported their mission.

CTO Lou Sacco oversees a team of five developers, support staff, and QA personnel. The company's APIs, which handle susceptible data, required security and protection, and they were looking for an API gateway solution that would meet these stringent requirements. Ambassador’s Edge Stack API Gateway solved this challenge and seamlessly integrated their Kubernetes environment.

“To install our products, we need a gateway that is cloud agnostic because we have clients who have OpenShift, AWS, Azure, etc. Because of that, we needed to partner with a solution that could support the integration of all of those,” shares Driss Lamrani. “And the main hurdle we found is that depending on which gateway you use, you may experience different performances with different platforms.”

Driss knew he needed to address the performance gap between Robot Trader & Robotadvisors clients’ based on their cloud environment. For instance, OpenShift's architecture limits CPU usage compared to Kubernetes-based systems. Over the past six months, Driss observed significant performance disparities between clients running Robot Trader & Robotadvisors products on AWS versus those on OpenShift. An environment-agnostic gateway was essential to resolve these performance inconsistencies. Finding a gateway that met these needs without incurring excessive costs and demanding infrastructure was pivotal.

“With other solutions, there was always something missing. And that's very important because the other solutions we experienced either had a very high cost of infrastructure or a high cost of paying the cost of having a variety of integrations to install. They’re harder to maintain; we needed a lightweight solution like Edge Stack,” shares Driss.

Finally, the team needed an API Gateway that prioritized security, especially given their sensitive clientele in the financial sector.

”We work with many highly regulated financial clients, and security needs to be a top priority. We are working with what we call highly-regulated people. And highly-regulated people need to be able to, on the spot, have those security needs met. Edge Stack provided that with instant quality,” shares Driss.

Ultimately, the team chose Edge Stack API Gateway because it met the challenges and problems they were facing with other gateways.

“The reason we chose Edge Stack is that it's very lightweight. And the fact that you don't have to manage a database, you don't have to manage a very high level of CPU…it's enough to be very cost-efficient, so we make decent savings by utilizing it,” shares Driss.

Additionally, the Robot Trader & Robotadvisors teams appreciated the modularity and ability to quickly adapt the product to their team’s needs. Being a young and innovative company, Driss emphasized the importance of remaining agile with all the tools they choose to incorporate into their platform.

“We have a cycle of improvement every two to three months, which is very short relative to most other typical software companies. It means we have to remain agile, and any tool we choose to use needs to reflect that as well,” shares Driss.

The ability to remain agile and nimble drew their team to select Edge Stack. Competing solutions were either too costly or burdened with extensive infrastructure and maintenance requirements. For example, their integration of Keycloak for SSO was quick and seamless with Edge Stack.

So far, Driss and his team say that since implementing Edge Stack, they have enjoyed zero outages, quicker time to market, and optimization of their infrastructure builds to a few clicks.

“We had several KPIs, and one of them is that since we installed Edge Stack six months ago, there’s not been a single outage, which quite frankly is phenomenal because with other gateways, we would have outages at least once a month,” shares Driss. Meanwhile, he acknowledges that “since the team has yet to experience any outages, they cannot give a for sure on the resilience of Edge Stack, but so far it’s 100%.”

Additionally, the team has been able to speed up their infrastructure builds from a full day to just a couple of hours by implementing Edge Stack. Driss noted, “Our guys have to work now to even make it more than one click with Edge Stack. I’m impressed.”

Conclusion: What’s Next for Robot Trader & Robotadvisors

What’s next for the Robot Trader & Robotadvisors team is spending more time building out Edge Stack’s dev portal feature because they’re trying to visualize their clients' APIs. Many of their clients, who are large, well-established financial institutions, have generated a variety of databases, legacy code, and data that need to be visualized easily.

“And in order to reduce that and make all of that data regularly available, what we’re trying to do is to evangelize and visualize their APIs so that our clients can see the big picture. That’s why we need Edge Stack’s dev portal feature,” shares Driss.

In the end, Robot Trader & Robotadvisors chose Edge Stack API Gateway because it was a cloud-agnostic environment, lightweight and resource-friendly, and offered the agility and modularity they sought to scale quickly. Try out Edge Stack for free today.