This Guidance demonstrates how to integrate SWIFT messaging protocols and services on AWS. Central Banks can take advantage of the global reach and reliability of SWIFT, while also leveraging the scalability, security, and cost-effectiveness of AWS to facilitate the exchange of financial information and transactions between financial institutions.

Architecture Diagram

[Architecture diagram description]

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Well-Architected Pillars

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you understand the pros and cons of the decisions you make when building systems in the cloud. The six pillars of the Framework allow you to learn architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable systems. Using the AWS Well-Architected Tool, available at no charge in the AWS Management Console, you can review your workloads against these best practices by answering a set of questions for each pillar.

The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.

  • To instrument this Guidance for operational excellence, CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS Config can be used to monitor, audit, and report on resources and applications in the AWS environment. These services provide visibility into the state and performance of the infrastructure and applications, enabling the detection and resolution of issues. Additionally, AWS X-Ray can be used to trace application requests and identify performance bottlenecks. Finally, the implementation of operational playbooks and runbooks can improve operational efficiency by codifying operational procedures and automating routine tasks.

    To safely operate the Guidance and respond to incidents and events, several practices are implemented. First, AWS services such as CloudWatch and AWS Config provide monitoring and logging capabilities to detect and respond to events in near real-time. Second, automated systems are used to respond to events and incidents, reducing manual intervention and minimizing the time to recover from failures. Third, testing is conducted regularly to validate the operability and resilience of the system. Finally, a well-defined incident response plan is established to provide clear guidelines on how to respond to incidents and minimize the impact of downtime.

    Read the Operational Excellence whitepaper 

  • Multi-factor authentication (MFA) and access control policies can help secure authentication and authorization. These AWS services can be integrated with this Guidance to provide additional security: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS IAM Identity Center (Successor to AWS Single Sign-On), and AWS Directory Service.

    Security controls such as encryption, network security, and monitoring can help protect resources. These are supported with the following services: Amazon VPC, AWS WAF, AWS Shield, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), and CloudTrail.

    Data encryption at rest and in transit, data classification and access control policies, and data backup and recovery strategies can help protect data. AWS services that support these include AWS KMS, AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), Secrets Manager, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon RDS.

    Read the Security whitepaper 

  • Network redundancy, load balancing, and distributed architecture can help implement a highly available network topology. AWS services that help ensure high availability while minimizing the impact of any single point of failure include Amazon Route 53, ELB, AWS Global Accelerator, Amazon RDS Multi-AZ, and Amazon VPC. 

    Loosely coupled dependencies, throttling, retry limits, and stateless compute can help establish a reliable application-level architecture. AWS services that can help with this include AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), and Amazon MQ.

    Auto-scaling, load testing, and capacity planning can help adapt to changes in demand when implemented. AWS services that can help with this include Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and AWS CloudFormation.

    Use AWS Backup and AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery to ensure that data is regularly backed up and can be recovered in the event of a disaster.

    Test the system's resilience using AWS Fault Injection Service to simulate various types of failures and ensure that the system is capable of withstanding failures.

    There may be limits and constraints such as service quotas, network latency, and geographic limitations that you need to be aware of. AWS services that can help resolve these constraints include AWS Trusted Advisor and Service Quotas.

    Read the Reliability whitepaper 

  • You can experiment with this Guidance and optimize it based on your data by using AWS services such as CloudWatch, X-Ray, Trusted Advisor, and Amazon Athena. Use these services to gather data, analyze the data, and identify areas for improvement.

    Use Amazon CloudFront, Route 53, and Global Accelerator to select the location where this Guidance should be deployed to decrease latency and improve performance.

    To meet the workload requirements of scaling, traffic patterns, and data access patterns, AWS services such as Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, ELB, S3 Transfer Acceleration, Amazon RDS Storage Auto Scaling, and more, can be used.

    Read the Performance Efficiency whitepaper 

  • When selecting services, you should consider the pricing model, the utilization of resources, and the cost of data transfer. AWS offers a range of pricing models such as pay-as-you-go, reserved instances, and spot instances. It is important to choose the pricing model that best suits your needs to optimize cost. You should also consider the utilization of resources and scale the resources based on demand to avoid over provisioning.

    You can plan for data transfer charges by estimating the amount of data transfer between AWS services to and from the internet. AWS offers various pricing tiers for data transfer, and you can choose the one that fits your usage pattern. CloudFront can help reduce data transfer costs.

    You can also use pricing models, such as reserved instances and spot instances, to reduce costs. Reserved instances provide a discounted hourly rate when you commit to using an instance for a specific term, while spot instances allow you to bid on unused EC2 capacity at a lower price. You can also use cost allocation tags to track and optimize costs.

    This Guidance uses Amazon VPC configured with private subnets following SWIFT CSP protocols, and resources such as EC2 instances, Amazon RDS instances, and Amazon MQ instances are deployed based on demand. Autoscaling groups can also be used to scale resources based on demand. Using these strategies, you can ensure that you are only using the minimum resources required and that you are scaling to match the demand. Additionally, AWS provides tools such as Trusted Advisor and AWS Cost Explorer to help monitor and optimize costs.

    Read the Cost Optimization whitepaper 

  • To scale efficiently, this Guidance implements autoscaling groups, which dynamically adjusts the number of EC2 instances based on demand. Additionally, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) can run containerized applications and scale horizontally to maintain performance. Lambda can also be used for event-driven applications to scale automatically based on incoming requests.

    This Guidance implements architecture patterns such as horizontal scaling and load balancing to ensure consistent high utilization of deployed resources. ELB distributes incoming traffic across multiple EC2 instances, while CloudFront can be used to cache frequently accessed content and reduce the load on origin servers.

    To support data access and storage patterns, this Guidance utilizes Amazon S3 for object storage and Amazon RDS. Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) can also be used for shared file storage. These services provide flexible and scalable storage options that can meet various data access patterns.

    Read the Sustainability whitepaper 

Implementation Resources

A detailed guide is provided to experiment and use within your AWS account. Each stage of building the Guidance, including deployment, usage, and cleanup, is examined to prepare it for deployment.

Open implementation guide

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Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.

References to third-party services or organizations in this Guidance do not imply an endorsement, sponsorship, or affiliation between Amazon or AWS and the third party. Guidance from AWS is a technical starting point, and you can customize your integration with third-party services when you deploy the architecture.

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