HDFC Bank: Throttling incoming traffic requests without changing the core banking system

Digital banking services in India have become increasingly popular, but many core banking applications are still developed in-house, based on legacy technologies using monolithic architectures. This is exacerbated by the rise in popularity of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system in India, a payment transactions system that facilitates both peer-to-peer and peer-to-merchant transactions.

Challenge

FYNDNA is an Indian software startup with the vision of enabling financial institutions to increase their customer engagement and profitability by developing cloud-native, digitally-enabled, versatile technologies. To improve customer experience and handle the increasing volumes of transaction, FYNDNA determined that banks needed a way to regulate, or throttle, the incoming traffic requests, without changing the core banking system.

Solution

Microservice based applications deployed on Kubernetes have become the de-facto standard for developing highly-resilient, continuously available, secure cloud native applications. And to bring about agility in adopting new and emerging technologies, and to address the technology obsolescence that large application architectures tend to suffer with time, FYNDA decided to explore alternative solutions, ultimately deciding on Dapr.

One of the applications leveraging the core FYNDNA foundational framework and Dapr is called Governor. Development began in early 2022 and the system went live after one year, becoming one of the fastest applications to be developed and deployed to a Tier One Bank – HDFC Bank – to overcome a myriad of challenges in handling UPI transactions.

Impact

HDFC Bank handles close to 750 million transactions/month however the UPI transaction rate varies throughout the day. Dapr metrics along with KEDA make it possible to fine tune this application.