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A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

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Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#131
post #3

I 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.

Lambdas are amazing at clearing queues.

You can have a single queue gathering workloads and then have Lambda functions grab a bunch of tasks, handle them, grab more etc. until the max runtime is met and they're automatically rebooted.

It's also pretty trivial to add more processing capacity when the queue goes over a specified limit just by allowing for more concurrent Lambdas.

And when there's nothing to process, you've got one idling Lambda doing nothing and costing nothing.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#132
post #28

I 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…

Which bank was that? As someone living in France, I bank with one of the "big banks" and even though I have no idea how their internal networks are laid out, I can't help but shake my head in disbelief whenever they send me an SMS to confirm some operation "for my security". Think adding a new transfer beneficiary, making a "large" bank transfer, or paying online with my credit card. The SMS doesn't even have all the…

(Probably, why take risk) Can't tell the bank name (but yeah, in the top 4 by size) and not trying to defend your bank but the SMS validation thing is actually on the state 'fault' and you are in fact legally covered in most cases, I don't have the legal text on hand but by typing in google : https://www.moneyvox.fr/banque/actualites/77237/fraude-sur-c... Look for Code SMS and you have a link to the european reglementation. I assume one of the reason is that in fact in case of phishing wire transfert are heavily monitored and reversible. Without giving technical details, in fact 'a lot of peoples' have actually large right to move sums of money around. The trick is that's it reviewed and reversible for days.
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