Enterprise Staff Portal
A serverless leave and payroll-advance approval system on Lambda and API Gateway, with DynamoDB-backed notifications and scheduled SES email.
- When
- July 2026
- Context
- Built at Cloud Chariots, an AWS Partner
- Role
- Solo build
- AWS Lambda
- API Gateway
- DynamoDB
- Amazon SES
- EventBridge
- IAM
The problem
Leave requests and payroll-advance approvals ran on manual back and forth between staff, managers and finance. Nothing was tracked, so nobody could say where a request was or who was holding it up.
Serverless application tier
- A decoupled application on AWS Lambda behind API Gateway, so it reduces always-on compute costs and scales on its own when everyone requests leave in the same week.
- DynamoDB holds request state, sessions and the notification feed, read back in real time by the portal.
Workflow automation
- Amazon SES sends transactional status email as a request moves through approval.
- EventBridge schedules drive reminders and status digests rather than a polling loop.
Access control
- Role-based access control separates staff, managers and admin operations.
- Input validation gates sit in front of every admin workflow, so unauthorised submissions are rejected before they reach the data layer.
Decisions
- Serverless over an always-on server
- Approval traffic is bursty and internal. Pay-per-use reduces always-on compute costs and removes the patching work that comes with instances.
- Events over polling
- EventBridge schedules the reminder work, so the system does nothing between events rather than running a cron host.
The result
- Leave and payroll-advance approvals run as a tracked workflow with an audit trail instead of email threads.
- No servers to patch, and serverless pay-per-use reduces always-on compute costs.
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