Real bricks: A real estate investment marketplace platform

Realbricks is a financial platform democratizing real estate investments by providing fractional real estate investment opportunities through an online platform with a $100 minimum investment requirement. The platform empowers investors with transparent information, comprehensive educational resources, and diverse real estate segments and removes traditional investment barriers. Realbricks fosters an inclusive financial landscape and enriches the lives of investors..

• Real bricks wanted to build a platform to help manage real estate investments.
• The first major challenge was building a platform compliant with financial regulations and standards, such as PCI-DSS and GDPR.
• Managing and handling many financial transactions was a significant challenge.
• Addressing the issues related to transaction throughput, and legacy, and infrastructure management was especially crucial.
• Securing the sensitive information of the users was another major challenge for Realbricks
• Integrating external financial services like payment gateways and ensuring data synchronizations was another challenge
• Detecting unauthorized transactions or identity theft within time was also a major challenge.

• To address the infrastructure management problem of Real Bricks, Simform experts used AWS CloudFormation IaC. This allowed the team to reduce the client’s development time.
• Further, we implemented a seamless CI/CD pipeline for faster and more efficient infrastructure deployment.
• Our team of experts resolved the problem of cron jobs for Real bricks by using ECS and scheduling tasks triggered by Eventbridge rules
• Further, we used AWS IAM and KMS to protect data and comply with regulatory requirements.
• Our expert team deployed the platform’s backend API using AWS ECS Fargate. 
• We also used AWS Lambda to generate a daily payment schedule
• Leveraging Amazon RDS, we ensured higher availability for the platform.
• We also monitored the system through Amazon CloudWatch and used AWS CloudFront to serve static content with low latency.
• Managing a large number of transactions for Real bricks was not challenging anymore with ALB and AWS Auto Scaling deployed.
• AWS WAF helped us to ensure data security for the platform, protecting it against web exploits.
• Certification manager from AWS helped us manage digital certificates and private keys.

• Real bricks increased the transaction throughput by 30% by leveraging Amazon RDS.
• Reduced the latency by 20% for each transaction leveraging Amazon CloudFront 
• Improved fraud detection and prevention by 15% by using Amazon CloudWatch to monitor and analyze transaction data
• Reduced infrastructure costs by 20% by using AWS Auto Scaling to scale resources up and down based on demand.

• AWS CloudFormation IaC- We used to address the infrastructure management problem of Real Bricks
• AWS CodePipeline –We used AWS CodePipeline to implement a seamless CI/CD pipeline for faster and more efficient infrastructure deployment.
• Amazon ECS- Our team of experts ran cron jobs using Amazon ECS 
• AWS Eventbridge- We ran scheduling tasks based on Eventbridge rules.
• AWS Lambda-Our team of experts used AWS Lambda to run cron jobs and generate a daily payment scheduler.
• Amazon RDS- We used  Amazon RDS to store relational data and we also leveraged the multi-AZ (Availability Zone) feature to achieve high availability.
• Amazon CloudWatch- Our team used Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the system manage log generation, create metrics and alarms for service utilization, and setting up email alerts for third-party API services.
• Amazon CloudFront- We used Amazon CloudFront to serve static front-end contents, resulting in low latency and quick data access at minimal cost.
• Amazon ECS Fargate- Our team used Amazon ECS Fargate to containerize workloads and reduce the time needed for application deployment.
• Amazon S3- We used Amazon S3 for storing user data such as images and PDF documents.
• Application Load Balancer (ALB)-We used ALB to enable Real bricks to handle more transactions on the platform, reducing its latency.
• AWS Auto Scaling- We used AWS Auto Scaling groups to scale containers up and down based on incoming traffic.
• AWS CloudFormation-We used AWS CloudFormation to reduce provisioning time.
• AWS WAF- We used to protect against common web exploits that can damage availability and security.
• AWS Certificate Manager-Our team used AWS certificate manager to manage security certificates like SSL and TLS, removing the time-consuming process of purchasing and renewing certificates.
• AWS IAM- Our team leveraged AWS IAM to ensure secure data access
• Amazon KMS- We used Amazon KMS to ensure the management of private keys needed to generate certificate requests.