> The migration to microservices is still an ongoing work. Ain’t that always the way
On schedule to be complyted in year, as of three years ago and still 80% in progress
A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda
91–100 of 132 posts
Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda
#92I'd really like to play with Bref but it more or less requires using serverless framework from what I understand as there are no guides on how to get it working with something like SST. I've used serverless framework before and I won't touch it again. It seems like a complete dead end with the team behind it more or less giving up on it to go work on a cloud backend alternative to lambda/etc. Docs were a mess, lot's…
What is "SST" in this context? Is it this thing? https://sst.dev/ I'm having trouble understanding where PHP fits into this scenario. If your cloud backend is in PHP, can't you just host that anywhere, separate from your frontends? Where does the serverless come in? And which did you use? (There are so many out there now, from AWS Lambda to Cloudflare to Fastly, etc.) If you're not limited to AWS, Google's Cloud Run…
Sorry I wasn’t clear.
Yes, that’s the correct SST. Yes, we could host our PHP anywhere and there are options like Cloud Run. We are on AWS and so I was talking about AWS Lambda but I understand that wasn’t clear at all.
The reason for wanting to use Lambda is for bursty/inconsistent workloads. We have EC2 servers that handle all our traffic right now but some are oversized to handle the peaks. There are parts of our system that we could easily offload to lambda to reduce the load on the main servers if we could easily run PHP in lambdas.
I’m going to take a look at the CDK example OP posted (sibling comment to yours) since SST is just a layer over CDK and you can reach down into CDK easily.
Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some banks have so much tech (legacy mainframe to cloud providers) I’ve head them describe themselves as an IT company that makes money off banking. My credit union is lackluster but that’s expected I’m not there for their mobile apps.
On the other hand, there a bunch of fintech startups now that only build fancy apps with nice UX on top of existing banking infra (often partnering with some legacy bank). I miss Simple :(
Me too. It helped me wrangle a budget where YNAB and all others failed
Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda
#94I'd really like to play with Bref but it more or less requires using serverless framework from what I understand as there are no guides on how to get it working with something like SST. I've used serverless framework before and I won't touch it again. It seems like a complete dead end with the team behind it more or less giving up on it to go work on a cloud backend alternative to lambda/etc. Docs were a mess, lot's…
You can deploy using the CDK for example: https://bref.sh/docs/deploy/aws-cdk
Oh wow, that’s almost exactly what I need. Thank you! I don’t know if this is newer or if I just totally missed it the last time I looked.
Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda
#95I have no clues about what's better but as a french I'm amazed by the idea to delegate banking operations to a cloud provider. Last time I worked in bank IT political requirement and good practices were using their own private physical network infrastructure over all the country and data storage server rooms were literally bunkers with armed security. Is it that common around the world and 'we' just happen to have be…
In the UK, it’s relatively common. Some of the older systems at legacy banks will still run on premise, but more because AWS lacks a mainframe instance type than anything else.
The main concern from the regulator perspective isn’t security as much as concentration of risk in a small number of providers: if AWS goes down, will it take the whole financial sector with it?
Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's way worse than you think. A large number of Swiss banks including Swiss banking regulators store all their data on Google Cloud.
A lot of swiss government data is also stored in AWS, made a few headlines during covid because we "delegate our data to the americans"
I mean it's all encrypted, right? Most cloud providers even allow you to specify your own encryption keys. Sure, the NRO isn't going to start uploading all their sat imagery to a gcp bucket, but I'd imagine it's fine for everything that's not classified.
Heck, even for the classified stuff, I heard Azure built a government owned datacenter running a self hosted copy of their software. Much better quality than asking some Gen Dynamics contractor to manage everything for you.
Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, at this point can we just stop with the echoing of old memes? I used PHP4 and have used it continuously up to the modern day. If it's not your choice of language that's fine - language choice is pretty unimportant in the grant scheme of things... that said, it can do everything you need it to do (outside of low level memory control). If you need bit-efficient data structures it isn't going to be a good fit... but…
I don't know a single dev across the years who has ever made php their first choice.
/wave
I've tried to leave, I've explored outside the relationship. I've dealt with thorns and rough edges. But I've grown, the language and ecosystem have grown and it's been _wonderful_. I truly consider _not leaving_ the PHP ecosystem when I gave an earnest effort to explore elsewhere one of the best decisions I've ever made.
I love to build cool shit and PHP makes that _ridiculously_ easy.
Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda
#98I have no clues about what's better but as a french I'm amazed by the idea to delegate banking operations to a cloud provider. Last time I worked in bank IT political requirement and good practices were using their own private physical network infrastructure over all the country and data storage server rooms were literally bunkers with armed security. Is it that common around the world and 'we' just happen to have be…
In the US at least, I never thought of banks as particularly tech-savvy, just change-averse. They tend to be the big companies with the worst websites and apps, transactions take days to clear, their secure messaging is a mess, everything about the UX is terrible, fraud handling and benefits usage seem like separate apps altogether... I dunno if any of that translates to their security handling, but I would imagine b…
Banking in the US is very different from banking in France. USA has all these tiny banks, credit union and such, in addition to the mastodons like chase, boa etc. In France, there are maybe five or six huge banks, and their subsidiaries. As far as I know, most of Europe runs on the same model (a few huge banks rather than a plethora of small banks).
Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda
#99I always love a story about a successful strangler pattern migration. I do wonder how they came to Lambda though. I love it for small workloads and highly variable demand services, but something like Treezor you'd think has relatively flat and high demand. The cloud cost for Lambda would be much higher than running the equivalent compute, even with something also highly scalable like ECS.
I'd be more worried about decimal data types being interpreted as floats. That could get gnarly fast on the wrong language runtime, and is partially why Cobol programmers are still in demand in the financial sector.
the beauty of bref is you work with the same php engine as before. I am a (very) long time PHP developer, my primary work is still Drupal so the ability to make a small serverless app in PHP was very handy for me. My app implements a webhook and I feel Lambda is made for this: the script is small and quite fast, it checks the payload and puts an item into SQS as appropriate. Then another infra can slowly empty the SQS queue. The problem here is the load is insanely spikey -- sometimes tens of thousands of requests in a very short time frame, sometimes nothing. Directly writing this into a transactional database would require very costly infra. The Lambda-SQS model smooths it out. It's fine if some changes take minutes or even hours to be recorded.
Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda
#100I always love a story about a successful strangler pattern migration. I do wonder how they came to Lambda though. I love it for small workloads and highly variable demand services, but something like Treezor you'd think has relatively flat and high demand. The cloud cost for Lambda would be much higher than running the equivalent compute, even with something also highly scalable like ECS.
We use Lambda (via Laravel Vapor; https://vapor.laravel.com/ ) for a big analytics batch processing job every night; it spawns hundreds of thousands of individual jobs that make various API calls, but only for a few minutes. For the rest of the day it's doing very little. I'd imagine a bank has quite a few of these sorts of bursty bash processing needs; ACHes, end-of-day reconciliation, etc.
At my last job, we had an architecture that ran hundreds of thousands of individual jobs with internal API calls for nightly account updates and reporting work, and it was a major battle to finally get it replaced with some simple SQL scripts which ran orders of magnitude faster while being a lot more reliable.
As I understand it, banking commonly uses JVM where you can easily do async or multithreaded processing and task scheduling, so lambda doesn't offer much over ECS, and the timeout could be a real killer.