Architecture Overview
☁️ Born in the Cloud, Built to Scale
Tuix-Timesheets is built on a cloud-native, event-driven microservices architecture using serverless components. The platform is hosted entirely on AWS Cloud to ensure scalability, high availability, and cost-efficiency.
🔁 Real-Time, Event-Driven Communication
The platform uses AWS SNS to handle real-time, asynchronous communication between services. Whether it’s a timesheet submission, approval request, or invoice generation, events are broadcast across the system instantly and reliably.
🧱 Every Feature, Its Own Building Block
Each key function — from time tracking to integration syncs and notifications — is implemented as an independent microservice. These services are loosely coupled, enabling fast development, easy maintenance, and reliable scaling
🛡️ A Secure Gateway with No Exposure
All client requests are funneled through a central API Gateway, which handles routing, throttling, and security. Behind the scenes, each microservice runs in a private AWS VPC, meaning no service is publicly exposed — a secure-by-design foundation for sensitive business data.
⚙️ Flexible by Design, Low-Ops by Default
This architecture gives us the best of both worlds: modularity for evolving quickly, and serverless simplicity to keep operational overhead low. Tuix-Timesheets can adapt to new requirements with minimal friction — and scale seamlessly as usage grows.
Technology Stack
At the core of Tuix-Timesheets is a carefully selected stack of modern technologies that enable performance, scalability, and ease of maintenance. Below is a breakdown of the tools, frameworks, and infrastructure that power the platform — from backend logic to deployment automation.
🧩 Backend
- Languages: Typescript, Golang
- Architecture: Microservices deployed as AWS Lambda functions
- Database: Each service uses an isolated PostgreSQL RDS database
🔒 Auth & Security
- Authentication: Auth0
- Authorization: Role-based access (Admin, Assistant, Employee)
- Isolation: All services and databases are inside an AWS VPC
- Access Control: All inbound traffic passes through API Gateway
🌐 Frontend
- Hosting: GitHub Pages
- DNS: Cloudflare DNS
- Assets: Cloudflare CDN for static content
🛠️ DevOps / Infra
- IaC: Terraform
- CI/CD: CircleCI pipeline triggered on pull request merge
- Deploy Flow: Uploads code to S3, updates documentation, and maps routes in API Gateway
☁️ Cloud Technologies (AWS):
- API Gateway – Routes and secures all incoming requests
- AWS Lambda – Runs serverless microservices with auto-scaling
- Amazon RDS (PostgreSQL) – Provides fast, reliable relational databases per service
- Amazon S3 – Stores binary assets and deployment artifacts
- AWS SNS – Enables event-driven communication between services
- AWS SES – Sends system emails for notifications and approvals
Why This Stack and Architecture
We carefully chose a microservices + serverless model to support our needs as a growing, distributed software company:
- Microservices allow us to break down responsibilities per feature, speeding up development, testing, and deployment cycles.
- Serverless (AWS Lambda) minimizes infrastructure overhead, and scales seamlessly with usage.
- PostgreSQL (RDS) provides fast, relational storage for timesheet data, with optimized queries and high durability.
- Auth0 enables fast, secure authentication with minimal custom logic, including role-based access and multi-tenant support.
- Cloudflare + GitHub Pages simplify frontend deployment and ensure our UI loads quickly and securely from anywhere.
- Terraform and CircleCI bring automation, reproducibility, and confidence in every deployment cycle.
This architecture ensures a low-ops, high-scalability environment that adapts to both light and heavy workloads.
Feature Highlights
Here are a few technical features that demonstrate how Tuix-Timesheets goes beyond basic time tracking:
- Slack Time Entry At the end of each workday, developers receive a pre-filled Slack message suggesting a time entry based on their GitHub and Jira activity — including commits, pull requests, comments, and ticket updates. This message is automatically generated by the system and sent via the Slack integration. The employee can review, edit, or add additional context before submitting it. Once confirmed, the entry is sent to the Slack microservice and stored in the system.
- Activity Tracking via Jira & GitHub Events such as commits, PRs, comments, ticket changes, and reviews are automatically collected and used to generate daily summaries. This helps reduce manual input and provides managers and employees with rich activity insights.
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PDF Generation Service Timesheets and invoices are converted from HTML templates into styled PDFs using a dedicated Lambda service. This ensures that reports are consistent, exportable, and professional.
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Role-Based Interfaces Each role (Admin, Assistant, Employee) sees only the functionality relevant to their responsibilities — from project setup to invoice downloads and time-off tracking
Challenges & Lessons Learned
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Managing Distributed Events Building an event-driven system means coordinating timing between services — especially for sequential events like logging, approval, and invoice generation. Using SNS helped us manage decoupled communication, but required strict message structure validation.
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Balancing Simplicity and Flexibility in the UI We had to ensure the interface was intuitive — even when it supported advanced use cases like adjusted timesheets or multi-project visibility.
Whether it’s time tracking, approval flows, or reporting automation, we help teams turn their processes into powerful digital products. Let’s talk about how we can help you build it.