Ask HN: Almost) Serverless Bank Possible?
What do you guys think?
Most software needs to scale down / up fast, has billing days or other external / internal events. And doesn't rely so much on permanent compute. What do you guys think?
Most software needs to scale down / up fast, has billing days or other external / internal events. And doesn't rely so much on permanent compute. What do you guys think?
Maybe. Note that there is more to the bank than the customer site. On the backend you have processing of incoming and outgoing ACH/wire transfers, data storage and retrieval for loan origination and collections, ATM processing, processing of branch transactions, and fielding support calls. That's just what I have come up with in the last 30 seconds. I'm sure larger banks do a lot more (e.g. check processing).
All of these systems could, to some extent, be architected around some form of event system that runs functions. That's how some fintech companies approach these problems. If I were making the decision, I would weigh the costs of deployment/management with the potential savings in compute usage. Deploying a single monolith, or a handful of microservices is much easier (to me) than dealing with a plethora of "nanoservices".
AWS Cloudformation to construct the system from a template so you could build a test system, do an upgrade, build one for another bank.
AWS Step Functions to deal with "business rules" situations and long-running workflows that run at human speed.
AWS Lambda for what you can easily do procedurally in less than 1s.
Time-delayed processing mediated by SNS, SQS, MQ and similar services. You will probably use a few different AWS databases from DynamoDB to Oracle.
Amazon has approaches to business facing authorization, audit trails, all sorts of things.
The thinking you attribute to fintechs and hedgies has been applied since the 370 in ordinary banks, it's very conventional and very correct.
There are reasons that some people don't trust the cloud but I don't you'd have trouble convincing regulators that it's OK. (e.g. they use GovCloud, Bridgewater does everything in AWS, etc.)