Corofy

corofy

Hi all! I'm Dmytro Dziubenko, Co-founder & CTO of Corefy, a white-label SaaS platform that empowers clients to launch their own payment systems in a few clicks. Our platform helps numerous payment providers and companies successfully cover all their payment acceptance needs. The key value of our platform for clients is that it eliminates the difficulties of payment provider integrations. After a single integration with us, clients get access to hundreds of ready-made integrations with PSPs and acquirers worldwide, allowing them to connect any payment method easily. In this article, I will share our experience deploying a payment processing infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The article is based on my 2021 speech at the “AWS Cloud for Financial Services” webinar, so I'll talk about our experience from that time. 2018: Migrating to AWS in a Month In 2018, our product consisted of the following: Payment gateway. Back then, we handled card processing with third-party providers' help, as most integrations implied redirecting to another payment provider where users entered their card details. Since our platform supports any payment method, we can integrate mobile wallets, invoicing, crypto processing, etc. Payout gateway. Its main functionality (amount splitting, P2P payments) has mostly stayed the same since then. Exchange rates service. Payment providers must work with multiple currencies, so we had an exchange rates service from the beginning. It still works almost unchanged. These capabilities were enough for some of our clients, so we launched relying on these three pillars in 2018. When launching, our main priority was to do it quickly and inexpensively while ensuring the system's scalability. Why quickly? We gained our first client quite unexpectedly. We worked on our platform for a long time, and finally, we got lucky and got the first client who had to go live as soon as possible. Within a month, we had to migrate to Amazon Web Services from our self-made clusters, which were deployed to OVH VPS using . Kontena At that time, we had minimal experience with AWS, but hiring new team members allowed us to complete the project on time. Ode to AWS Services The infrastructure was made in the Amazon management console using the ClickOps method without any automation. Since we only had one client at the time, there wasn't much traffic. However, the load gradually increased as we got new clients. The critical services we used were ElastiCache, RDS, and ECS. ElastiCache is an excellent service that allows you to work with Memcached and Redis. It supports working with single nodes and clusters and provides the ability to create snapshots. You can deploy all of this to different availability zones. All the functionality of Redis is also available in the ElastiCache service. RDS is my favorite service, making it possible to work with various DBMS (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle) without worrying about physical problems. It can be deployed both on Provisioned storage and in regular mode. RDS eliminates the need to organize custom backups because snapshots will be sufficient for most needs. Plus, they don't affect the productivity of your DB server. Another possibility is restoring your database from a snapshot taken at any point in time ( ). point-in-time recovery ECS is a docker container orchestration service from AWS, which has been fundamental for us for a long time – almost all of our resources run in it. At that time, had just been rolled out on AWS and had a limited toolkit to support it, so we couldn't even get started. EKS AWS itself invests quite a lot of effort in the development of ECS. However, it's primarily aimed at integrations with internal services – FireLens (logs), App Mesh, Blue-green deployment (CodeDeploy), Container Insights (CloudWatch), SecretManagement (SSM), and Serverless (Fargate). There are also comical moments. For example, they added the ability to delete a just recently. It's worth noting that it doesn't require paying for control plane nodes, unlike in the EKS case. task definition As a result, by the end of 2018, we had the following infrastructure: two availability zones, several minor services, a database (primary/secondary), and Redis. But due to limited time, ClickOps, and lack of experience, we rolled out one NAT in two availability zones. The main issues we encountered during that time were and credits. EBS has a limit on the number of IOPS depending on the disk volume, and when the instance is launched, this limit is very small. EBS T2 instances If you start using the disk heavily with the new EBS, you will likely reach the limit soon, and all operations will become much slower. We use the Symfony framework, which warms up its kernel cache before starting. It added complexity – we even tried to switch to tmpfs. 2019: Passing PCI DSS Certification By the beginning of 2019, we had not yet had our own card processing, but we had designed it and were ready to begin development. We faced a choice: to stay on Amazon, where we had a little more than six months of experience, or to return to OVH. Since no one on the team had practical experience with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard ( ) certification, choosing an infrastructure provider was crucial for us. PCI DSS We did an extensive SWOT analysis to make a final decision. The OVH provider offers various to facilitate PCI DSS compliance. They provide a cluster on dedicated servers and take some certification responsibility. packs But, as we expected, managing it was challenging as it also required some experience. Since the whole world is moving to the cloud, moving to a dedicated server didn't feel right, so we decided to stay on AWS. We considered how to get certified and how to scale. Besides, we wanted to work with popular technology, not some underground like OpenStack 🙂. Moreover, we had to be able to find specialists for support. AWS wouldn't be AWS if it didn't have a recipe for deploying a PCI DSS-compliant infrastructure. For this, they made an excellent . CloudFormation It is actively supported, with new modules and improvements being added over time. With one person's efforts, we set up the staging environment in a week, allowing us to set up production in one day. We decided to create a separate account for PCI DSS certification passing. As a result, we got two infrastructures. I believe it was the right decision at the time, although it caused us a lot of extra work and pain in the future. There were few resources, all described in code, all PCI DSS requirements were met, and only two operators had access to this infrastructure. The infrastructure operated in three availability zones, with its own KMS keys. Preprocessing communications were implemented via HTTP API and SQS to avoid complicating our infrastructure with internal peering. It allowed us to state that card transaction processing is a separate system with its own API, and the only client of that API is our product, Corefy. During 2019, we gained a lot of new experiences. First of all, it's passing PCI DSS certification. We also learned how to work with EBS and realized that capacity planning is mandatory because our partners started sending traffic as soon as we launched the card infrastructure. The volumes of this traffic were sometimes unexpected. Today we process 3000 operations daily, tomorrow 30000, and the day after tomorrow – 300000. Sometimes we learned about such changes through alerts or visual traffic monitoring. Mistakes to Avoid There's a pitfall you can avoid as you start working with autoscaling. During 2019, we "killed" our cluster several times with autoscaling because for our backends were set incorrectly. health checks If you do not possess adequate resources to declare that your service instance is ready and you frequently poll it, a scenario may occur where the load balancer assumes that the service cannot accept any traffic and thus removes it from the traffic distribution. While the new service is setting up and warming up, the traffic to other instances increases, where the effect can repeat. Thus, like an avalanche, all cluster services become unavailable. An interesting story happened with the database. At the time, it lived on instances of the T family with default disks. When you see that EBS credits are already approaching the mark below 100, and you don't expect a decrease in traffic, upgrading the T-type instance is a poor decision. As soon as you do this, you will not have a stock of credits on EBS. They start from zero. The database will "devour" the burst rate at the start and won't be able to work stably. Simply put, it will overload. It was the first serious incident when working with the database that taught us to ensure enough capacity. We have come to understand that, in our case, instances of the T family are suitable only for the PoC infrastructure. 2020: Migrating From RDS to Dedicated Servers The productivity of applications started sinking due to increased traffic and DB data volumes. Sometimes we got unexpected behavior from the app when there was a lot of traffic or when, for example, some payment provider was unavailable. We learned to handle significant traffic changes (x3-x5) and store and process dozens of gigabytes of data daily. Operating at such loads, we faced new types of problems. For example, some processes had no reconnects to Redis, or incorrect reconnection occurred when working with the database. Sometimes this created parasitic traffic, and we "clogged" the Postgres connection pool. We decided to migrate from RDS to dedicated servers due to the expenses associated with infrastructure, the frequency of minor incidents, and insufficient comprehension of RDS instances' capacity in relation to our processing performance. Over several months, we mastered new tools and planned the migration. The choice fell on Patroni, where we built an almost classic scheme: we had Haproxy, and traffic went through NLB to instances with PostgreSQL and Patroni. We had five etcd instances in three availability zones, so if one of them went down, we had a quorum. Running on three servers, this solution allowed us to process more data for less money. Isn't that happiness for business? To begin with, we took i3en instances and then upgraded them to i3en.2xlarge. Problems We Faced 1. First, the etcd cluster collapsed, and because of this, the Patroni cluster collapsed. Quorum didn't help. The switch of the master occurred independently, and the cause wasn't immediately apparent. Eventually, we discovered that the issue's root was related to time synchronization. We resolved the problem by implementing chrony. 2. Incorrect configuration. The parameters didn't match the capabilities of the machines running the services. Mainly, that’s because there were no revisions during migrations. 3. reset the connection to port 5432 if we update the target to 5433. In our architecture, there was a division of ports into writer and reader on one balancer. NLB We reported this to support and were offered to send everything in its entirety to reproduce the issue. It required a hell of an effort, so we decided to let it go. Keep in mind that communication with support can be less efficient than you'd expect. 4. . There is a problem I wish no one to face. On November 2, 2020, at 08:58 AM, our server started rejecting all attempts to write something to it. It was the beginning of our biggest BD incident of all time. Wraparound We had physical copies in backups and had to restore BD using backup urgently, but it didn't work due to a physical problem with . XID counters We decided to truncate the top tables, make a dump of the minimum amount of data, roll out processing from it, and then add data in the runtime. It is not an exhaustive list of the issues we faced, but most occurred due to inadequate resource segregation. When we had background processes and the web running, for example, on one ECS cluster – it was one division. The second division was domain one. Communication with payment providers could take place in different queues and clusters. By the end of the year, we had over 10 ECS clusters and 100 queues. We also had 4 PostgreSQL clusters, preprocessing, card processing, and a merchant portal (a separate application with its own database cluster that we provide to clients – payment systems – for reselling our channels). There were also four public load balancers for just one product. We also completed the merging of two AWS accounts into one. More than 10 million transactions passed through the system per month, so we had 2.5 TB in two DBs. We already understood the load profile and could plan it for long periods. We took the Savings Plans on EC2 Instance i3n for our databases for a year and saved about 35%. Cluster scaling tuning and their saturation with spots also allowed us to save significantly and purchase Savings Plans for critical clusters on C5. 2021: Migrating to AWS Aurora The number of incidents, on-calls, and instability in the service operation led us to move our card processing to . We decided to try a smaller project and then migrate others if everything went smoothly. AWS Aurora Gradualness was necessary to estimate the cost of operation because it was difficult to predict the number of reads and write IOPS. We started to digitize all our infrastructure in Terraform actively. It's not the most pleasant thing to do, as you have to make many and work with production that isn't fully described in the code. imports Retrospective As a result of the experience gained, I want to draw certain conclusions retrospectively, through the prism of the value we could have received: It will help create documentation, allow others to enter your project with minimal involvement, conduct audits, and deploy similar infrastructures. We haven't done it, so now we're making up for it. Describe the entire infrastructure in code from day one. For example, it's one thing if you want to save, but if the downtime is costly – it is quite another. Our migration from AWS RDS to Aurora was through our dedicated self-managed instance. In 2020, we received a lot of negativity and a bad user experience precisely because of the database. Of course, we've grown as a team in terms of architecture and infrastructure. But if we compare the financial and reputation losses with the amount we could have spent on Aurora, it would have been more rational to choose Aurora. There's a mental trap: when you calculate the cost of the service, sometimes it seems easier to build it yourself. But you must also consider the cost of system maintenance, people's work, monitoring tools, backups, and everything else that Amazon provides "out of the box". Prioritize and review goals for the period. Growth planning is closely related to cost planning. Namely, you can opt for Savings Plans, allowing you to grow more organically and cheaper. Take advantage of this opportunity. Do cost planning to avoid unpleasant surprises. An instance can "die" at any moment, and your application must be able to handle it. Design your applications so that they work on spot clusters. We haven't planned the development of our accounts, so for some time, we had development, production, and other company resources that were not related to processing in one account. That's why we did it in a separate account when it came time to prepare our infrastructure for PCI DSS certification. We just couldn't do it in our main account filled with various unrelated resources. Now we have come to the point where it is essential to separate accounts. We transfer them to another root account to perform SSO, divide workloads by type (development, production), and allocate separate accounts for resources, logs, and everything unrelated to processing. Avoid having all resources in one account. A Little Thanks to AWS By deciding to work with AWS in 2018, we switched focus from solving infrastructure problems to product development. It's worth saying that AWS comes with a fee. support With the growth of your infrastructure costs, the price you'll have to pay for support will increase respectively, even if you don't use it. Speaking of the positive aspects, I'd like to highlight the efforts of the account managers and architects automatically assigned to projects with a budget of $5k or more. We worked closely with them to optimize our sage of AWS services and lower the overall cost. There are tons of programs out there that aim to hook you up and increase your AWS check. However, they offer credits for mastering certain services, allowing you to save money. For example, if you develop a Machine Learning product, it's an excellent opportunity to get several hundred or even thousands of dollars for your PoC. Plans We strategically decided to switch to K8s, build a data warehouse, and reorganize our AWS accounts. I will tell you about all this in detail in the following articles.

Deploying Payment Processing Infrastructure to AWS: Corefy's Experience

Let's learn about via these 73 free stories. They are ordered by most time reading created on HackerNoon. Visit the to find the most read stories about any technology. Infrastructure /Learn Repo [1. With Cyber Threats on the Rise, Nero Consulting Encourages Businesses to Keep Their Guard Up](https://hackernoon.com/with-cyber-threats-on-the-rise-nero-consulting-encourages-businesses-to-keep-their-guard-up) Nero Consulting CEO Anthony Oren has watched countless companies suffer from the lack of preventative measures to secure their systems. 2. Docker is dead. Long live the Unikernel. As the cloud-native ecosystem evolves, it is beginning to appear as if a challenger to containerization has emerged. In this blog post, I'm going to dive into what unikernels are, and why I think they will be the most likely candidate to replace container-based infrastructure. 3. Web 3.0: A Poem Cryptographically, the brave may not live forever,
but the cautious do not live at all. 4. Serverless Benefits And Challenges: 2020 Edition While we know the many benefits of going serverless - reduced costs via pay-per-use pricing models, less operational burden/overhead, instant scalability, increased automation - the challenges are often not addressed as comprehensively. The understandable concerns over migrating can stop any architectural decisions and actions being made for fear of getting it wrong and not having the right resources. This article discusses the common concerns around going serverless and our advice to minimise their impact. 5. Deploy Docker Using Ansible 6. 2023 Will Be the Year of Kubernetes (and Other Predictions in the Cloud and Infrastructure Industry) Dive into the new year’s top cloud and infra-tech trends, straight from a cloud and infrastructure technology fanatic. 7. Introducing Driftctl: Your IaC Security Belt We recently released the first versions of driftctl, a new open-source project for infrastructure developers, DevOps, SRE, and cloud practitioners, with the goal of helping manage all kinds of drifts. 8. Decentralized Computing & Storage vs. Legacy Cloud Solutions On November 11th, 2021, an Infura outage collapsed large swaths of the Ethereum ecosystem... 9. Improving Security in your Microservices Architecture with Istio Security in a microservice architecture with Istio 1.12 10. Reimagining OSS BSS Systems to Shape the Future of the Telecom Industry OSS and BSS are entities that represent the operational and business sides of the telecom respectively. They enhance the engagement with their customers. 11. How to Scale Global Infrastructure Teams It's early on in a products lifecycle that it begins to require a global SRE presence. Once you have gained sufficient customer traction, and if your product warrants it, you need to provide them with around the clock availability support to complete the customer support jigsaw. 12. Developers and Cloud IaaS: Why Devs Should Set Up Their Own Cloud Infrastructure Why Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) still rules, even for developers. 13. The Zoom Boom's Impact on Innovation, Infrastructure, and Mental Health The corona virus has challenged all aspects of our lives. Healthcare not with standing, one of the biggest challenges has been in trying to keep as much of our lives as possible running as normal. Technology might already have altered the way we work, rest and play for good– but it’s been even more crucial during a period where people are working from home and avoiding large gatherings in the US and the rest of the world. In this post, we’ll look at how tech industry is rising to the corona virus challenge to keep the world moving. 14. Understanding Event Driven Architecture Event-driven architecture is a software architecture paradigm promoting the production, detection, consumption of, and reaction to events. 15. How The Hotstuff Protocol is NOT Secure? Each participant stores a tree of pending commands locally, in addition to the state variables viewNumber (starting at 1, stores the highest QC it voted to pre-commit), and prepareQC (starts at nil), lockedQC (starts at nil, stores the highest QC it voted to commit). When a “new-view” or round starts, a public function determines the leader from the current participants. 16. Edge Computing is So Fun Part 6: Why You Need to Embrace The Open RAN Ecosystem To understand why embracing Open RAN should be an easy decision and get a better understanding of what is Open RAN and what are the benefits of Open RAN. 17. COVID-19 and the Decentralized Economy Testing the System 18. Could Capture-Resistance Liberate the Web As We Know It? The internet, by design, has enabled many forms of capture from data mining to market manipulation. So how do we build infrastructures which avoid capture? 19. Smart Trains: A Long Journey to Transportation Revolution Smart cars might be the future, but what about high-speed smart trains? 20. Improving Observability Through Service Level Metrics 21. How Companies like Netflix Deliver Content Around the World Have you ever wondered how companies like Netflix or Spotify is able to delivery videos or songs to you at what seems like lightning fast speed !? 22. Mighty App: Fad or Rad? The Mighty App promises a lot and it might seem like a waste of money but, thanks to some quirks, it can be very useful when it comes to downloading at speed. 23. Examples of Weird Infrastructure Tests: A Thread Kane shows examples of the weirdest infrastructure tests. 24. Running a Global Blockchain Node Infrastructure Ecosystem: How We Do It Blockchain infrastructure is basically the decentralized deployment of different blockchains, and the overlay network that sits on top. 25. The Blockchain Infrastructure that Caters to Web3.0 Needs The Blockchain infrastructure that caters to Web3.0 needs 26. What is Software-Defined Networking and Why Is It the Future of Networking Connections? Software-defined networking, otherwise known as SDN, is a new approach to networking that has come to be favored by experienced technology professionals. 27. KYVE Mainnet Goes Live on Pi Day, Opening The Doors To Truly Trustless Data In Web3 KYVE, the decentralized data lake, mainnet officially live, opening the doors to truly Trustless data in web3. 28. How Embedding an Inbox Feed in Your Application Can Benefit Your Users Inbox Feed is an in-app repository of the notification history so that users don’t miss out on any important information. 29. The Top 5 DevOps Tools and Services to Consider as a Startup A collection of DevOps tools can significantly enhance your Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and increase engineering productivity. 30. Building Your Infrastructure With Just a Diagram This hands-on tutorial will teach you how to create infrastructure via the AWS Application Composer Console. 31. DaaS: A Boon for the Insurance Industry Know the benefits of opting for Desktop-as-a-Service or DaaS provider for the insurance industry - Get Mobility, Cost benefits & much more. 32. Serving Structured Data in Alluxio: Example In the previous article, I described the concept and design of the Structured Data Service in the Alluxio 2.1.0 release. This article will go through an example to demonstrate how it helps SQL and structured data workloads. 33. Serving Structured Data in Alluxio: Example In the previous article, I described the concept and design of the Structured Data Service in the Alluxio 2.1.0 release. This article will go through an example to demonstrate how it helps SQL and structured data workloads. 34. How to Prepare Your Site for Heavy Traffic Monitor your infrastructure.
First of all, you should know what's happening with your website. If you're experienced with Prometheus/Grafana, you could use them, but if you’re not, it's not a problem;  you can use any monitoring service, such as DataDog or any other SaaS service, and set it up really quickly. If it's still hard, use pingdom or site24x7, at least to check that your website is still available. 35. Using a Product-Led Growth Mindset to Improve User Experience How changing the development mindset to a product-led-growth one can improve the user experience by focusing the thought process for the team's members. 36. Nginx Logs - Fair Database Benchmarks How one test works to analyse millions of Nginx logs from a live website and what to learn from the analysis results while processing it in a timely way. 37. How To Evaluate Potential IT Monitoring Solutions Check out top factors you need to consider when choosing IT monitoring tool. Learn how to pick the best solution for your business. 38. Ultimate Guide To Building an Unbeatable Multi-Tenant SaaS Startup With Heroku [Part 1] In this multi-part series, I'll transform a new application into a multi-tenant experience running in the Heroku ecosystem. This article focuses on the object model, design, architecture, and security. 39. Cloud Infrastructure Can Set Legacy Data Free For a long time, it’s been widely accepted that startup businesses can gain an edge over larger, establishment rivals, due to their lack of legacy tech baggage. For example, modern challenger banks have – in terms of features and UX at least – ran rings around the traditional stalwarts thanks to their modern IT and data systems. 40. How To Manage Infrastructure With Terraform What is Terraform? 41. Learn About Infrastructure as Code in 5 Minutes and Why You Should Use It Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the process of managing and configuring an infrastructure using configuration files, rather than manually editing configurations 42. Overcoming The Most Frequent Monitoring Challenges Engineers Face Let’s look at some most frequent monitoring challenges that engineers face, along with monitoring IT tools and how these can be resolved. 43. 5 Best Low-Code Development Platforms in 2022 What Low-Code development platform to choose in 2022? 44. Check Out the Principles and Best Practices of Infrastructure as Code for 2023 Infrastructure-as-code is a very important concept to understand in the DevOps world today. 45. What Exactly Is An “Infrastructure Provider” In Web3? Infrastructure providers play a key role in Web3 development. They will be the roads and highways that enable seamless Web3 communication via secure protocols. 46. Quicknode: Your One-Stop Web3 Infrastructure Provider Quicknode: Your One-Stop Web3 Infrastructure Provider 47. Why do we need a through table explained with Rails? In a many to many relationship, it's just a table between the entities, but what is the purpose of this table to be between them? 48. What Is The True Cost of Using Public APIs How ubiquitous are APIs in today’s development processes? Try asking an engineer how many APIs their project integrates. Most teams won’t know the answer. From analytics tools to maps and cloud hosting, modern applications use a hefty collection of internal and public APIs. Developers use these to quickly assemble applications that would otherwise take much more effort to build. However, there’s a forgotten expense not typically calculated early in a project. 49. Best Practices of Cloud Networks Usage in Fintech Making good use of a could network first requires firms to consider if they would be meeting their regulatory obligations before ensuring network resilience. 50. How to Optimize IT Infrastructure: Let's go over the stages. The guide looks at on-premises and on-cloud IT infrastructure optimization, as well as a hybrid approach to moving from on-premises to the cloud. 51. Scaling Our AWS Infrastructure This article is written by Kareem Ayesh and Yasser El-Sayed. 52. Our Industrial Infrastructure Is A Ticking Time Bomb It took one aquarium thermometer to steal 10GB of data from a Las Vegas casino. The adapter, which lacked basic security policies, was simply not on the security staff’s priority list. It was, however, on the hackers’. 53. How To Pick The Best Tech Stack for your SaaS Startup Choosing the right set of frameworks, database, front-end tools, back-end tools to build a long lasting tech stack for your SaaS 54. 4 Essential Steps To Convert a Kubernetes Fullstack App to Heroku In the last several years, Google’s Kubernetes project has generated huge buzz. The project has grown and evolved into a titan of the cloud infrastructure world. 55. How To Adjust Size Of A Kubernetes Cluster Using Cluster Autoscaler Spawning an AWS EKS cluster has never been easier and options are many: CloudFormation, Terraform or CDK. For the lazy, you can even use the great CLI utility eksctl from Weavework. 56. Introducing Apron Network: A Gateway to Decentralized Infrastructure Services Apron Network, a project supported by the Web3 Foundation, received early grants from the Web3 Foundation. 57. KubeMQ Build & Deploy Test Drive: My First Impressions Meta: KubeMQ, makers of the eponymous Kubernetes-native message queue, has a new web-based tool that promises to make setup a breeze. Let's try it out! 58. An Introduction to AWS VPC VPC is the topic that flies under the radar of many Software Developers, despite being present in every AWS account (well, maybe not for accounts created before 2009...but that's unlikely). There are a few reasons for this I can think of: 59. My Journey to Achieving DevOps Bliss, Without Useless AWS certifications The story of how I transformed from a naive full-stack engineer struggling with AWS and PaaS providers to loving my life and achieving DevOps bliss. 60. Lessons for Improving Training Performance — Part 1 Part 1: Lower precision & larger batch size are standard now 61. The One Config to Rule Them All Goplicate - An epic tale about a developer trying to maintain dozens of project config files and finding the one config to bind them and rule them all. 62. Why You Should Run Multiple Applications on the Same GPU (and Why it's so Difficult) While GPUs are being used more and more, many users encounter the problem of not utilizing them properly. 63. Serving Structured Data in Alluxio This article introduces Structured Data Management (Developer Preview) available in the latest Alluxio 2.1.0 release, a new effort to provide further benefits to SQL and structured data workloads using Alluxio. The original concept was discussed on Alluxio’s engineering blog. This article is part one of the two articles on the Structured Data Management feature my team worked on. 64. If You Learn to Build Scalable Applications, You Can Change Your Career What we're up to 65. Faster than Linux FTL usually refers to "faster than light". A theoretical particle known as a tachyon that powers certain spaceships in the Star Trek universe keeps the plot going for decades through multiple series and and movie franchises. 66. Deploying Payment Processing Infrastructure to AWS: Corefy's Experience Hi all! I'm Dmytro Dziubenko, Co-founder & CTO of Corefy, a white label SaaS platform that empowers clients to launch their own payment systems in a few clicks. Our platform helps numerous payment providers and companies successfully cover all their payment acceptance needs. The key value of our platform for clients is that it eliminates the difficulties of payment provider integrations. After a single integration with us, clients get access to hundreds of ready-made integrations with PSPs and acquirers worldwide, allowing them to connect any payment method easily. 67. Utilizing the Elasticsearch Snapshot Module for Databackups on Azure blob Storage While running a self managed elasticsearch cluster like any other database, it's important to make provisions for data backups. Data backups on Elasticsearch can't be done by simply copying elasticsearch data files from one disk to another, this tutorial guides you through making the best use of the Elasticsearch snapshot module for creating cluster snapshots and leverages the Azure blob storage for securely storing your backed up data. Also besides backing up data, the snapshot api also comes in handy for migrating data from one cluster to another. 68. Terraform Configuration Syntax Overview All you need to know to get started about Terraform Syntax. 69. Andros Wong's Wonder is Providing DAOs with Technical Infrastructure Wonder has one key concept and it is that “the future is collaborative” 70. Setting up Continuous PostgreSQL Backups This manual describes the process of setting up continuous backups for PostgreSQL databases to safeguard your data from accidental loss in an efficient way. 71. Ten Things to Know about (Digital) China and Beyond. Today, there are more than 900 million Internet users in China -- about three hundred million more than Europe’s total population. It is also more than twice the total U.S. and Canadian populations combined in 2019. 72. Understanding the Business Valuation Logic of Apron Network The core of traditional business project strategy is positioning, which is the consensus of the industry. The traditional theoretical framework for positioning strategy was first proposed by Michael Porter. 73. Introduction to AWS Log Insights as CloudWatch Metrics A step-by-step description of how to create an AWS Lambda to convert Cloudwatch LogInsights into metrics Thank you for checking out the 73 most read stories about Infrastructure on HackerNoon. to find the most read stories about any technology. Visit the /Learn Repo

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By Adam Fard, founder of adamfard.com a UX Design Agency Anyone who has gone through the process of looking for, evaluating, and hiring UX designers will tell you that it’s not easy. First, you need to find UX designers, then you need to evaluate them against structured criteria, and then finally, you need to convince them to join your payroll. Of course, all that is easier said than done. To make sure you get through this process as smoothly as possible, you’ll want all the help you can get. Here’s an insider’s guide on how to find, evaluate, and hire UX designers successfully. Where Can You Find UX Designers? Targeted Outreach Targeted outreach is one of the most effective ways to find a great UX designer, especially if you have a team that has worked with — or knows someone who has worked with — designers in the past. As the name suggests, targeted outreach means you need to make the first move and contact prospective designers. Sit down with your team and brainstorm a few names. Create a list of UX designers and start reaching out to them. If they’re too busy or not interested, ask them to refer someone else. Essentially, targeted outreach is based on referrals, so you can rest assured knowing that you’ll find someone with relevant experience and expertise. Online UX Design Communities There are plenty of online communities where UX designers can show off their designs and share portfolios. Here, you can find skilled UX designers from all around the world, browse endless designs, and even post a job with your specific requirements. Keep in mind that while these online communities are an awesome place to screen visual designs, they’re not particularly useful when it comes to understanding the strategy, vision, interaction, or architecture used by the designers to build the final product. Namely, you get a glimpse of the surface but not what is beneath it. ”A beautiful product that doesn’t work very well is ugly.” — Jonathan Ive For this reason, it’s important that you know exactly what you want and need from your UX designer. Otherwise, you might end up finding a UX designer who excels in creativity but is lacking in the strategic department. Prominent online UX design communities include Dribbble, Behance, Coroflot, and Awwwards. UX Job Boards Even though you can post your UX design job post on any job search engine, it’s best to post on job boards that specialize in UX design. This way, you can be certain that your post will target and reach the right audience: UX designers. Here are UX job boards where you can find your ideal UX designer: UX Jobs Board Toptal Just UX Jobs Designer Hangout Authentic Jobs How Do You Evaluate a UX Designer? When you find a UX designer who seems like a good fit, it’s time to put them to the test and evaluate them. How do you do this? Everyone has their own methods, but most interviewers just go with their gut feeling. This is wrong. Your instincts — or innate biases — should not be the main selection criterion for a UX designer. You have to know what you want in a UX designer. What is good depends on a candidate’s matching the competencies that you’ve chosen, at the levels of proficiency that you need.” — Nathaniel Davis Instead, you should develop valid selection criteria to make the evaluation — and ultimately, the selection — more accurate. To objectively evaluate UX designers, follow these four steps: Define the specs of your project and design requirements. 1. Know what you want. What skills are vital to the successful completion of the project? 2. Evaluate hard skills. What personal attributes does the designer possess 3. Explore soft skills. Can they create a viable design solution that satisfies expectations? 4. Test UX designers. Additionally, you want your criteria to feature various qualities and skills that are essential to your project. This will ensure that the UX designer can easily adjust and contribute to your team. Here’s what to look for when hiring a UX designer: Design Skills Can this UX designer do the job efficiently? What do you want to find out? Review portfolio, ask questions, and give design exercises. How can you find out? Do they have sufficient experience in UX design? Experience. Can they identify, question, and prioritize problems? Problem setting. Do they base their design decisions on user insights? User-centered process. Are they able to quickly generate high-quality solutions? Do they understand how their solution will fit into users’ lives? Idea generation. Systems thinking. Is their design appropriate for the audience? Visual appeal. Does their design feel new and original?# Innovation. People Skills Do I want to work with this designer? What do you want to find out? One-on-one interviews, cover letters, and back-and-forth emails. How can you find out? Are they a good listener and a persuasive speaker? Communication. Can they work efficiently as part of a team? Collaboration. Do they represent your company’s values? Cultural contribution. Do they take proud ownership of their work and decisions Leadership. Did they read up on your company prior to the interview? Mission. UX designers that possess these skills are definitely worth considering for the job. If you’re stuck on finding the right questions to ask UX designers during interviews, here are a few that will give you the information you need to make the final decision: Describe your design process and methods.Describe the challenges you faced on a recent project.How did you approach the problem?Provide examples of how you deal with user research and usability testing.How do you handle criticism from clients?What does it mean to be a great UX designer?What analytical tools do you use to evaluate your designs? What Else Should You Know Before Hiring a UX Designer? When looking for the right UX designer, companies often make mistakes that end up blowing up in their faces. Make sure to avoid these common mistakes when hiring UX designers: Do not expect a UX designer to perform a wide range of tasks outside their professional domain, like UI, marketing, and QA. If you’re looking for a great UX designer, stick to looking for someone who’s just that. Merge separate roles. Do not make the assumption that a UX designer with only a handful of samples in their portfolio is any less experienced than someone with 20 samples. Focus on what’s inside the portfolio, and put an emphasis on quality over quantity. Judge a UX portfolio on quantity. Do not set unrealistic deadlines and rush a UX designer. This will do you more harm than good. Great UX design takes time. Accept it. Give the designer enough time to do their job properly, or risk cutting your product’s chances of success. Expect a fast turnaround. Do not reach out to UX designers with a boring job ad. Create one that will stand out from the crowd and spark interest. Share your company story, promote your work culture, and present your vision in a way that will leave a positive impression. Posting a mediocre job ad. Do not think that UX designers are a dime a dozen. They’re not. UX is an extremely competitive market. This means you should think of ways to motivate and retain top UX talent even before you acquire it. Ignore the competitive UX market. Finding, evaluating, and hiring a UX designer is not the easiest task. There’s no denying that. But with the right approach and can-do attitude, you can find a great UX designer to join your team. Originally published at adamfard.com | Insider’s Guide: How to Find, Evaluate and Hire UX Designers .

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