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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

#81
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…

I've worked for a bank in Europe, and the core banking system is as you describe it.

Other satellite services and applications are migrated to the cloud or SaaS, but the core is an old school mainframe, solid and tested to the last bit.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#82
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…

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…

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.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#83
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 :(

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have your data, you have our money, sounds fair =)

They don't though. Swiss tax wealth (though its a tiny fraction). IRS makes it a massive PITA to hold substantial financial stakes in foreign companies. See FATCA and GILTI. And many tax deferred foreign retirement funds are not treated as being tax deferred by the IRS. It only gets more complicated from here. It's by far easier to earn and hold cash in America.

Isn’t the point of a Swiss bank account that the IRS doesn’t know about it?

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#85
post #4

I don't know which surprises me more: that they continued to use PHP in their move to serverless/microservices or that nobody else on HN has questioned this point yet. I totally get why they would keep PHP: they have the language/platform experience already and AWS supports it (which is really more than enough to silence the "You should have switched to {other_language}!" partisans). Plus, I imaging non-trivial amoun…

Perhaps we're finally at a point on HN where people realize there's no need to question the use of PHP. it's a robust, capable language that's just as, or more, suitable for the majority of use cases as any other language.

[flagged]

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't though. Swiss tax wealth (though its a tiny fraction). IRS makes it a massive PITA to hold substantial financial stakes in foreign companies. See FATCA and GILTI. And many tax deferred foreign retirement funds are not treated as being tax deferred by the IRS. It only gets more complicated from here. It's by far easier to earn and hold cash in America.

Isn’t the point of a Swiss bank account that the IRS doesn’t know about it?

That was many years ago. The entire Western world is compromised and reports to the IRS -or- the bank kicks out anybody who MIGHT be a US Citizen to avoid being sanctioned. The end result is only the few most central banks in the country take American clients -or- they are hopelessly behind on regulatory compliance (YOLO).

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#87
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we're finally at a point on HN where people realize there's no need to question the use of PHP. it's a robust, capable language that's just as, or more, suitable for the majority of use cases as any other language.

I think most of that was coming from the (then) next generation JS crowd who was trying to fit everything into one neat little box. They've since burnt themselves out and found the limitations in their approach during the process.

I’m the usual suspect for shi^W questioning php and I think you are wrong about demographics.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#88
post #5
post #4

I don't know which surprises me more: that they continued to use PHP in their move to serverless/microservices or that nobody else on HN has questioned this point yet. I totally get why they would keep PHP: they have the language/platform experience already and AWS supports it (which is really more than enough to silence the "You should have switched to {other_language}!" partisans). Plus, I imaging non-trivial amoun…

I'm wondering if PHP's reputation has been rehabilitated somewhat in recent years. At least amongst those who understand the significant changes in modern PHP, and the difference a stable framework like Laravel makes. I've found PHP with Laravel a stable and solid workhorse. Good for getting things done quickly, and then a stable system over time. In contrast, I've gradually become disillusioned with the node.js and…

It genuinely amazes me that Node is as popular as it is, especially within large mission critical businesses. If this bank was using TypeScript no one would have questioned it, but you're right, TypeScript is a nightmare to maintain. I probably only use about half of packages I used 5 years ago because either those packages are no longer maintained or the community has switched to some other package that basically does the same thing just in a slightly different way. There's also no real industry standard ways to do anything in Node. You find 10 different Node CRUD projects and they'll all do things completely differently.

The PHP ecosystem on the other hand tends to be less fragmented and these days with frameworks like Laravel the code is generally also pretty good. I think it gets a bad reputation because in the 00s there were some truly horrific PHP projects out there and the language itself was quite immature and poorly designed. That's not the case anymore though. These days I struggle to understand the hate it gets. It's certainly no worse than than Node.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#89
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

By any chance does the name of this bank sound the noun you'd use to describe a large urban area?. I've heard it too.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#90
post #66
post #35

Earlier 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…

It's alright. I'll be busy getting some easy WordPress work that's fun to do (especially if you use Laravel with it with the roots.io ecosystem) while people are trying to get their obscure Rust blog with leptos/X to compile to WASM so they can deploy it to fly.io and use their remote hosted database for 5 users/month.

I think the point of making the blog on whatever cool tech of the day, instead of wordpress is later getting a job involving said cool tech, not the blog itself.
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