Banking and payment platform

The project is an intuitive, transparent, free banking and payment platform for small and medium-sized businesses, designed to streamline financial management and accounting processes in one system.

The platform provides a universal solution for effortless company budget management, secure and automated payment processing, swift and convenient transfers, seamless handling of bills and invoices, and automated accounting on the cloud.

To simplify the work for business owners and accountants, we aimed to create a seamless and intuitive UX. Moreover, we integrated the product with third-party services for payment and transfer processing, invoice recognition, user verification, and automated accounting.

Our main development challenge was to create a stable and scalable architecture to handle tens of thousands of transactions every month without any delays.

The AWS architecture integrates services like ECS, S3, RDS, ElastiCache, API Gateway, and Lambda. Each of these services performs a specific role, and their integration provides a complete, scalable infrastructure for cloud applications. However, due to the architecture’s complexity, we faced some issues, including:

• Service configuration and interaction: Managing IAM policies and ensuring secure communication between private and public networks were critical to prevent security breaches and access issues. Additionally, configuring secure routing between private subnets and public services required precise setup of NAT gateways and VPC Endpoints.

• Monitoring and logging: Ensuring complete system visibility through CloudWatch and EventBridge was challenging, with risks of misconfigurations, which could lead to missed critical events.

• Scalability and performance: Properly tuning Auto Scaling to balance load and avoid under or over-scaling was essential for maintaining performance and controlling costs. Also, efficiently connecting ECS API, RDS, and Redis while maintaining load balance and fault tolerance required careful setup.

• Configuration management: Securely managing access to secrets with AWS Secret Manager was vital to prevent data leaks.

• Deployment challenges: While we initially planned to rely on AWS Lambda, as the project grew, the service’s limitations led to a shift to Amazon ECS, better suited for the project's increasing complexity and resource demands.

Though the architecture is quite powerful and scalable, it introduced potential points of failure and demanded meticulous attention to each component's configuration. However, with careful planning, we were able to mitigate risks, ensure security, and optimize the system's performance.