About the company

A prominent U.S.–based financial institution.

Challenge

The financial institution’s web portal is open to more than 40,000 registered representatives that perform complex activities and provide data for compliance and regulatory needs. The company had more than 10 teams working on disparate web applications that were linked together, and they navigated through the portal using legacy technologies. These are critical no-downtime applications integral to market functioning, compliance and integrity.

The company sought a technology partner to create a new greenfield system to build an intuitive and smooth customer experience, resulting in monetary benefits gained from improved efficiency. It was critical to seamlessly transition customers to the new portal and expedite engineering teams to deliver web applications using the latest cloud-native technologies while establishing a governance process. Requirements for the new system involved:

End users to:

• Provide an omnichannel, responsive single-page application (SPA) experience to perform daily activities
• Create a one-stop web application that provides a user-friendly customer experience
• Transition representatives smoothly from the existing legacy system to the new greenfield system

Engineering application teams to:

• Develop a web portal to present a native, cohesive SPA experience to end users by composing and integrating web applications developed by teams across the enterprise
• Architect, design and implement decoupled frontend and backend systems for applications
• Architect, design and implement a mechanism for teams to deliver capabilities with minimal risk
• Enable applications to implement and deliver business value rather than implementing events for crosscutting concerns

What we did

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) DynamoDB database service
• AWS Lambda platform
• Automated Jenkins Pipeline
• GraphQL federation
• Multi-Availability Zone (Multi-AZ) disaster recovery
• Micro frontend framework

Solution

The financial institution had already adopted the AWS cloud and had mature enterprise operations, governance, DevOps and approval policies. However, AWS Serverless technologies were not being utilized extensively within the enterprise. We collaborated with the company’s technology team and utilized enterprise policies, foundations and frameworks. By leveraging industry best practices, we established new patterns using a bleeding-edge technology stack across frontend and backend systems on AWS to deliver loosely coupled, reliable, scalable and secure systems. Other services included:

• Architecture and design for building loosely coupled, highly scalable, composable web applications using AWS Lambda and DynamoDB
• An opinionated micro frontend framework to provide a web portal that loads web applications and provides implementations for crosscutting concerns
• Implementation of an extensive framework to support independent no-downtime deployments of individual micro applications by engineering teams using automated Jenkins Pipelines
• Continuous backup using a Jenkins Pipeline–based configuration DynamoDB restoration
• Reference architecture and reusable modules for backend systems to implement application programming interface federation using GraphQL
• Extended provisioning for Infrastructure as Code support for AWS Lambda and DynamoDB using automated Jenkins Pipelines
• Processes to onboard web applications onto the web portal
• Web applications and portal testing using automated tests triggered via Jenkins
• Integration with existing enterprise-wide authentication/authorization mechanisms
• Multi-AZ disaster recovery setup for the web portal

Result and outcomes

With the successful implementation of the greenfield system, the program has been successful among business users within the company: