Creating a serverless provisioning engine on AWS
BBD partnered with a client to design and implement a serverless provisioning engine that leverages AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions as the centerpiece of their automation and orchestration strategy.
Objectives:
- Provide a centralised provisioning engine to orchestrate business flows triggered by multiple sales channels
- Simplify integration across existing systems and improve operational resilience
- Support new products and services with greater agility
- Establish a reusable automation foundation using small, single-responsibility functions
- Streamline operations through automation and serverless orchestration
- Reduce infrastructure overhead while maintaining scalability and compliance
- Provide monitoring, observability, and alerting across business-critical flows
- Support faster feature delivery through CI/CD pipelines and standardised deployment practices
- Lay the foundation for future extensibility
Benefits:
- Faster time-to-market: New services can be onboarded quickly by composing existing functions, significantly reducing development effort
- Reduced operational overhead: The serverless architecture minimizes the need for infrastructure management
- Increased reliability and resilience: The design ensures that workflows can be re-triggered without impacting upstream systems
- Improved visibility: Integrated observability and alerting provide real-time insight into business-critical flows, enabling proactive incident management
- Future scalability: The modular design allows the platform to evolve with new services and integrations without proportional increases in infrastructure costs
Overview of the solution:
The client needed a centralised, resilient, and scalable provisioning engine to automate critical business flows across various internal and third-party systems. Their goal was to move away from complex, monolithic integrations toward a more agile and reusable platform.
BBD addressed this challenge by designing a serverless provisioning engine with AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions at its core. Each business flow was modelled as a Step Function that orchestrated lightweight, single-purpose Lambda functions. This approach created a highly scalable and resilient platform that orchestrates business-critical processes across multiple systems. The solution not only simplified integrations and operations but also provided the foundation for a repeatable, automated workflow, allowing the client to deliver new products and services faster and more reliably.
Approach:
BBD’s approach centred on a serverless-first design, using AWS Lambda and Step Functions as the primary building blocks. The core principles were:
- Single-responsibility functions: Business flows were broken down into small, reusable Lambda functions to promote maintainability and reusability
- Orchestration with Step Functions: Step Functions were used to orchestrate these Lambda functions, providing a reliable and observable way to manage complex workflows
- Ecosystem integration: The provisioning engine was seamlessly integrated with the client’s existing systems, including billing, product catalogue, messaging, and audit trail systems
- Containerised API Gateway: A containerised API running on EKS acted as the entry point for all orchestration requests, providing a consistent and scalable interface.
- Centralised Configuration: Configuration data was centralized to ensure consistency and flexibility across different business units
- CI/CD pipeline: A robust CI/CD pipeline was implemented to enforce code quality, security scanning, and automated deployments
- Observability and alerting: Monitoring and alerting mechanisms were baked into the orchestration layer to ensure quick detection and remediation of failures
Impact of BBD’s partnership:
BBD’s partnership fundamentally transformed the client’s ability to deliver and scale digital services. The serverless provisioning engine delivered a highly automated platform that significantly reduced operational overhead while boosting reliability and responsiveness.
The modular design, which allows for the rapid addition of new customer journeys and integrations, has laid a strategic foundation for future growth. The provisioning engine is now recognised as a core part of the client’s digital ecosystem, enabling their ambition to provide seamless, reliable, and scalable customer experiences.