When it became apparent that U.S. firms would need financial help during the pandemic, Congress approved $349 billion in emergency small-business funding for loans under the Paycheck Protection Program. It fell to the Small Business Association to administer those loans, and the agency quickly turned to Amazon Web Services Inc. and third-party reseller Four Points Technology LLC to develop a key cloud-based element of the program.

Lender Gateway was created by SBA to help smaller, community-oriented banks without large IT organizations process PPP loans. Although the PPP has attracted widespread interest, perhaps less well-known is that a portion of the lending program was being powered by an innovative serverless solution, which resulted in Four Points receiving the 2020 “Most Customer Obsession – Mission” award from AWS Public Sector.

“What’s interesting about Lender Gateway is that it’s the first application we’ve built from scratch in a totally serverless capacity,” said Ryan Hillard (pictured, right), system developer at SBA. “When we’re launching a system, we need to know that that system will not go down, no matter how much traffic it receives or how many requests it has to handle. We leaned on services like AWS Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, all of their serverless offerings, to make sure that under no circumstances could this application fail. And it never did.”

Hillard spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, about the AWS Public Sector 2020 Partner Awards Program. He was joined by Joel Lipkin (pictured, left), chief operating officer of Four Points, and they discussed how Four Points helped facilitate deployment of AWS services for the SBA, and the cost benefit of using serverless technology. (* Disclosure below.)

Leveraging Lambda

Four Points’ delivery model is built around giving clients, such as SBA, full control over cloud environments and enabling them to use the comprehensive range of AWS services, according to Lipkin.

“SBA has really been a leader in using a variety of AWS services beyond standard compute and storage, not just in a tested environment, but in a live, very robust, really large environment,” Lipkin said. “They have access to all of the 200-plus services that AWS has.”

Hillard and his team leveraged AWS Lambda, an event-driven serverless computing platform. SBA found that the use of serverless provided cost savings as work and website volume skyrocketed in recent months.

“Our main website — SBA.gov — is now serving a hundred or 1,000 times more traffic daily than it was used to doing, but because we lean on serverless technology like Lambda, we have scaled non-linearly in terms of cost,” Hillard said. “We’re only paying two or three times more than we were per month, but we’re doing a hundred or thousand times more work. That’s a huge victory for cloud technology in my opinion.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Public Sector 2020 Partner Awards Program. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Public Sector 2020 Partner Awards Program. Neither AWS, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE