Reference solutions/Reference architecture
Reference architecture

A practical foundation for a digital product.

A reference design for a product team building authenticated APIs, asynchronous processing and a repeatable path from development to production.

The workload question

SaaS & API foundation

Your product needs identity, an API boundary and background processing, with a deliberate approach to tenant isolation, deployment and data ownership.

ILLUSTRATIVE DESIGN

This is an illustrative serverless option. A container-based application may be a better fit for existing software, long-running processes or specialised runtime requirements.

Related delivery service
AWS REFERENCE DESIGN
Amazon CognitoIdentity
→
API GatewayAPI boundary
ILLUSTRATIVE WORKLOAD ENVIRONMENT
AWS LambdaRequest handlers
Amazon SQSBackground work
AWS LambdaWorker functions
Amazon DynamoDBApplication data
Amazon S3Object storage
Identity and API boundaries, request handling, asynchronous work and application data.
Illustrative relationships. Final configuration follows workload discovery.
Design decisions

The choices behind the components.

Architecture is a set of trade-offs. These are the questions to resolve before implementation.

01

Tenant isolation

Choose pooled or isolated data and resource patterns. Enforce tenant context in authorisation and data access, not only in the user interface.

02

Resilience

Use idempotent handlers, retry limits and dead-letter handling for background work. Define which errors should be retried.

03

API protection

Define authentication, authorisation, throttling and input validation. Add edge protection where compatible with the selected API configuration.

04

Growth & limits

Review concurrency, payload sizes, throughput and database access patterns before committing to the serverless design.

Validation before handover

Test the assumptions.

The acceptance plan should check the behaviour of the full workload, alongside individual AWS resources.

  • Verify that one tenant cannot access another tenant’s data.
  • Replay an event and check that duplicate work is handled safely.
  • Demonstrate a release, rollback and traceable error investigation.

What a project adds

A workload-specific architecture, implementation plan, cost assumptions, operating runbooks and a record of agreed validation checks.

Your next step

Explore this pattern
for your workload.

Tell us about your workload, current challenges and timing. We’ll use that context to discuss a suitable scope.

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