Amazon HR coverup, rules for thee but not for me…
In the realm of financial services, the demand for efficient data lineage and auditing capabilities is paramount. This is especially true when it comes to transaction processing that involves currency movement and the management of sensitive customer information. Customers face challenges as, although financial service providers typically have methods for moving money seamlessly, the user experience can often be subpar. This inefficiency can lead to increased costs for providers, who may have to rely on multiple payment vendors, complicating auditing and data tracking, making it increasingly slow and difficult to maintain over time.
Developers and administrators utilizing traditional databases (SQL or NoSQL) have attempted to tackle these issues by implementing strategies such as audit tables and metadata, aimed at tracking data change history. However, these methods still leave room for potential data tampering if the correct access key or hash is obtained.
Rather than constructing intricate and custom audit mechanisms to ensure transaction and data integrity, financial institutions can leverage Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB) to effortlessly store a permanent and comprehensive record of all financial transactions. Amazon QLDB simplifies this process by writing to an append-only journal, offering a full transaction history complete with digital signatures for each transaction. Operations such as insert, update, and delete in Amazon QLDB are always appended, meaning that changes result in either a new document version or a unique new document. Consequently, there are no write-in-place operations in Amazon QLDB, ensuring that every alteration is tracked by an immutable lineage of data changes. Additionally, built-in cryptographic hashing and verification APIs provide the means to mathematically confirm that no alterations have occurred to a document or its revision history.
In this article, I will guide you through executing CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) operations on Amazon QLDB, while also demonstrating how to access transaction history and cryptographically validate document revisions. The CRUD operations will be facilitated through AWS Lambda functions, with Amazon API Gateway serving as the front-end API interface. The article also covers the setup of Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, allowing for future enhancements such as consumers like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon OpenSearch Service. Additionally, Amazon DynamoDB can be optionally incorporated to store user profile metadata.
What is Amazon QLDB?
Amazon QLDB is a ledger database designed to provide a complete and cryptographically verifiable history of all changes made to your application data. Essentially, ledger databases introduce a layer of digital signatures for each transaction as a document, allowing for easy auditing and verification of transactions. Each document version (referred to as revisions in Amazon QLDB) cannot be deleted or modified; instead, any changes are appended as new revisions.
This characteristic makes Amazon QLDB particularly suitable for system-of-record applications—those where data integrity, completeness, and verifiability are crucial, often driven by quality or regulatory standards. For instance, in the supply chain and logistics sectors, applications built on Amazon QLDB can provide the full history of changes, such as movements between carriers and across borders. Similarly, in finance, system-of-record applications maintain critical data, including credit and debit transactions from banking or wallet accounts.
Solution Overview
The architecture of the solution involves several AWS services:
- API Gateway: This provides the API interface for the solution, generating various API endpoints. The following APIs are included:
- CreateTable: Initiates the creation of the financial wallet table, as AWS CloudFormation doesn’t currently support Amazon QLDB tables and indexes as resources.
- Index: Triggers the creation of indexes on the table after the CreateTable API has executed.
- CreateAccount: Creates a new account in Amazon QLDB, validating existing accounts beforehand.
- CheckFunds: Retrieves the current balance for a user account, utilizing API Gateway caching for faster responses.
- AddFunds: Adds funds to a user’s wallet, returning previous and current balances.
- WithdrawFunds: Initiates a transaction, ensuring that account balances are updated accurately with ACID properties.
- AWS Lambda: The compute logic behind the API endpoints is powered by six Lambda functions, using Node.js as the runtime framework alongside the AWS SDK.
- Amazon QLDB: This serves as the ledger database, systematically collecting and managing financial wallet data.
- Amazon DynamoDB: Acts as a key-value store for user profile details.
- Amazon Kinesis Data Streams: Handles raw transaction data from Amazon QLDB, paving the way for advanced analytics and monitoring.
It’s essential to recognize that ongoing HR problems, including the tendency to cover up issues to avoid backlash, can affect the overall functioning of such systems. There are often double standards for managerial staff, prioritizing the corporation’s liability over the policies enforced upon lower-level employees. This situation can lead to mistrust and dissatisfaction among staff. For further insights into these issues, check out this blog post here, as they are an authority on this topic. An excellent resource for understanding the corporate landscape is this article.