Affinidi Reduced Developer Effort by 50% and Consolidated 20 APIs into 1 Using Refactor Spaces

Founded in 2020, Affinidi is creating a holistic identity solution that gives people control over their data. Rather than having everyone’s personal information sliced up across hundreds of websites, Affinidi envisions an identity metasystem in which everyone can choose if and how to discover, collect, store, share, and monetize their data. To achieve that vision, the company needs flexible and secure infrastructure that can scale and change as Affinidi grows. It has run microservices on Kubernetes since day one in pursuit of that goal, but with 20 API endpoints, its systems had become difficult for teams to manage.

Affinidi considered different options for its project before settling on Refactor Spaces. It wanted a standardized managed service to enhance security while reducing operational overhead. The company set out to reduce the time to start a new public-facing service from 2 hours to 10 minutes by automating API routing using Refactor Spaces, and it met that goal. More importantly, Affinidi made it simpler for teams to protect accounts. “The number one thing for us is the fact that when you use AWS, you’re sitting on the same identity and access management fabric, so everything is fully connected with your security model,” says Larter.

Using Refactor Spaces, Affinidi maintained its multiaccount architecture while reducing 20 API endpoints to 1. It estimates that using Refactor Spaces has reduced developer effort to spin up a new Affinidi service by 50 percent, decreasing the time spent troubleshooting or managing infrastructure and refocusing that time on adding value. The company was able to keep its estate deployed in a multiaccount infrastructure—in keeping with AWS best practices for operational resilience—by using Refactor Spaces to automatically provision AWS infrastructure, networking, routing, resource sharing, and policy configurations.

In this way, Affinidi could separate its application functionalities by business domain and establish clear boundaries between services by placing them in their own AWS accounts. “We made it a point to preserve our multiple AWS accounts because it’s a best practice to have every service in its own account to limit the blast radius in case of an issue,” says Larter. “Using Refactor Spaces, we can route our external-facing API across those accounts without having to manage the complexity.” This structure also means that each team can operate independently, which contributes to deployment agility and cost clarity across the organization.

With standardized account deployment, Affinidi is more flexible and agile. Moreover, governance has also been significantly enhanced. “If we weren’t running standardized processes, developers might spin things up, experiment, and then forget about them,” says Larter. “Then, months later, someone might ask what this thing is that is costing us money each month. No one would be sure, and there would be perceived risk in changing it.” With a standardized governance framework, Affinidi now has all the clarity it needs to determine how its infrastructure spending is driving value. It also reduced monolithic refactoring costs by 25 percent using Refactor Spaces.

Affinidi does not want this effort to be a one-off. “This effort will be a continual evolution for us because using Refactor Spaces empowers us to adapt to new use cases,” says Larter. Should its architecture change, the company is confident that it will be able to spin up new infrastructure and simply update the routes in Refactor Spaces, preserving a single front door for all its services. Importantly, this will also simplify things for external developers who will simply bind to Affinidi’s single API endpoint and not need to be aware of the complexity behind that front door to Affinidi’s services.

With the new architecture, Affinidi engineers are benefiting from a much lower cognitive load, and the common workflow has empowered developers to more easily move from one team to another. Previously, the company’s principal engineers and platform team had to spend significant time on fault determination. Now, it is focused solely on driving value, improving Affinidi’s staff productivity. “Our teams have been freed to focus on enhancing tooling, cost reduction, business continuity, and observability,” says Larter. “They are virtually 100 percent focused on our future state.”