Accelerating Development Speed by 90% Using AWS Serverless Technology with SBS

As part of its portfolio of financial software, SBS offers specialized financial services for automotive and equipment leasing firms. However, the company’s previous architecture was monolithic, ran on premises, and required it to manually configure a per-customer instance. SBS wanted a new system based on a multi-tenant microservice architecture that would make it faster, more cost efficient, and simpler to deliver value to customers.

“Our goal is to create an environment where the products that we deliver are on a single-instance, multi-tenant platform that’s cost optimal,” says John Bartlett, head of engineering at SBS. But the company realized that the serverless platform framework it wanted didn’t exist. So, it built its own serverless platform from the ground up. SBS is an AWS Partner, and it was already using AWS services to power its application. “We were exploring AWS because it had a large industry presence and all the services we needed,” says John Bartlett. It decided to build the new framework using serverless AWS technology including Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service that makes it simple for developers to create, maintain, and secure APIs at any scale.

SBS created a serverless architecture based on microservices and created the cloud-native SBS Financing Platform- SFP, which provides banks and lenders with an out-of-the-box solution for providing financing to customers. The company used Amazon EventBridge, a service for building event-driven applications at scale across AWS, existing systems, or SaaS applications, to decouple its services and maintain flexibility. “We use a whole suite of AWS services,” says John Bartlett. “They’re our core services.” This architecture wraps around the existing application, so SBS can deliver it as SaaS to all its customers with much less manual work while retaining the ability to connect additional products, components, and features through the platform in a seamless way.

By dividing its monolithic application into distributed services, SBS has increased its agility and scalability. Furthermore, SBS runs code without overprovisioning or manual configuration using AWS Lambda, a compute service that businesses can use to run code without thinking about servers. “On AWS, we’ve built a serverless API middleware layer and microservices architecture—that means zero management or infrastructure overheads,” says John Bartlett. As a result, it’s simple for SBS to maintain regulatory compliance and provide low-latency service.

SBS manages all the authentication components using Amazon API Gateway. Now, it can offer its complex services to smaller, lower-margin customers that don’t have advanced IT setups. The company can scale its SaaS as needed and adapt it to a customer’s needs with its single serverless framework built on AWS. “Offering a SaaS solution, we don’t want to be deploying multiple instances tailored for each customer,” says Anthony Bolster, principal software architect at SBS. “We’ve created a single SaaS deployment model using AWS services that scales automatically across all our customers.”

In addition, the company can update individual elements independently without affecting other parts of the system. It used to take hours to develop changes to the SaaS and days to approve them; now, SBS can do it 90 percent faster and at a significantly lower cost. Instead of being limited to monthly updates, developers are releasing them daily. Meanwhile, SBS has cut bespoke deployments from hundreds to just one. And scalability is now driven by demand, which has eliminated idle infrastructure.

Because developers can work within isolated domains, they rarely need to coordinate with other teams and can deploy their changes quickly while being confident in their work. The faster development process has led to several new features. Using Amazon OpenSearch Service, which securely unlocks real-time search, monitoring, and analysis of business and operational data, SBS has created a new universal search capability that quickly scans financial data, reducing the response time for customers from seconds to milliseconds. The company has also implemented multitenant single sign-on to unify all its applications under one login system, so that customers don’t have to create and manage multiple accounts for different products.

SBS has reduced the complexity of its architecture while improving the experience for its developers and customers. “We’re going through a transformation,” says John Bartlett. “Our technical framework is underpinning where we want to go as an organization, and that’s a big cultural transformation as well.”

SBS’s transformation is ongoing. The company plans to continue migrating features from its old architecture to the new serverless framework for even faster updates. It also aims to expand the SFP to more regions and improve regional failover capabilities by using AWS services.