Architecture Overview

The Apostille system follows a serverless, event-driven architecture built on AWS.

High-Level Architecture


┌─────────────────┐     ┌─────────────────┐
│  Citizen Portal │     │   Admin Portal  │
│   (Next.js)     │     │   (Next.js)     │
└────────┬────────┘     └────────┬────────┘
         │                       │
         └───────────┬───────────┘
                     │
              ┌──────▼──────┐
              │ API Gateway │
              └──────┬──────┘
                     │
              ┌──────▼──────┐
              │   Lambda    │
              │  Functions  │
              └──────┬──────┘
                     │
    ┌────────────────┼────────────────┐
    │                │                │
┌───▼───┐      ┌─────▼─────┐    ┌─────▼─────┐
│DynamoDB│     │    S3     │    │Step Funct.│
└────────┘     └───────────┘    └───────────┘

Key Components

Frontend Portals

Citizen Portal - Public-facing Next.js app for document submission and tracking
Admin Portal - Internal Next.js app for processing requests

Backend Services

API Gateway - RESTful API with Cognito authorization
Lambda Functions - Serverless compute for business logic
DynamoDB - NoSQL database for all entities
S3 - Document storage with presigned URLs
Step Functions - Workflow orchestration
EventBridge - Event bus for async processing
SNS - Notification delivery

Design Principles

Hexagonal Architecture - Clean separation of domain, application, and infrastructure layers
Event-Driven - Loose coupling through events
Serverless-First - No servers to manage
Infrastructure as Code - All resources defined in CDK