BBPOS Brings Real-Time Visibility to Payment Processing on AWS

With AWS, BBPOS can support customers in more than 50 countries with single-digit millisecond latency and real-time visibility into its IoT devices. Based in Hong Kong, BBPOS was one of the founders of mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) devices and supporting software. The company uses AWS Global Accelerator for low-latency data transfers, Amazon Elasticsearch Service for real-time analytics, and AWS Fargate to automatically scale containers in a serverless fashion.

As eWallets and contactless payments take hold across the world, mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) devices have become a staple within retail and dining environments. Gone are the days when customers must walk up to a register to make a purchase. Merchants of all sizes likewise benefit from smart, portable devices that do much more than process payments. 

As mPOS platforms open doors to value-added services such as inventory management or an ecommerce platform, more merchants are transitioning from cash to electronic payments. In fact, global mPOS transactions are predicted to increase at a compound annual growth rate of over 25 percent. This potential has long been recognized by Hong Kong–based BBPOS, which in 2008 worked to integrate smartphone technology into the payment transaction process. With clients in more than 50 countries, BBPOS continues to deliver innovative end-to-end solutions that encompass mPOS hardware and supporting software.

Enterprise customers use Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled products from BBPOS to stream data from their stores—often internationally—to IT teams at company headquarters. Such large-scale operations require global solutions and support, which BBPOS provides through cloud-based infrastructure running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

By taking advantage of three AWS Regions in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, BBPOS can help ensure compliance with its customers’ data residency requirements. Multi-AZ deployments on AWS support data redundancy and high availability across regions. BBPOS further relies on AWS Global Accelerator for routing optimization between its customers’ sales outlets and home office. This is vital for delivering low-latency data transfers and fast payment processing in stores. 

“By using AWS Global Accelerator, our customers in the back office have real-time remote control of mPOS devices in stores with very low latency. They can also view the logs from each device, with data being streamed in real time between the AWS Cloud and their desktops or web browsers,” explains Raymond Tang, product manager for software at BBPOS.

A highly available cloud infrastructure is essential for BBPOS customers, such as Amazon and international chains of convenience stores, whose operations run around the clock. With AWS, BBPOS is able to maintain 99.99 percent service uptime on the AWS Cloud at all times. Furthermore, real-time access to logs and mPOS devices ensures its customers’ engineers can troubleshoot in-store issues right away to prevent business disruption.

Most BBPOS customers are also using the AWS Cloud as their infrastructure platform. While its devices can be integrated within any backend system such as web portals, the company recommends that customers use AWS. This facilitates highly secure data transfers with built-in security protocols on the AWS Cloud. 

Customer care is vital to BBPOS’s strategy and success, and the company maintains a dedicated support team within the US that works closely with customers. “When our customers are also on AWS, the AWS platform becomes a common language between us to discuss how we can improve performance with technology,” Tang says.

At the recommendation of some of its customers, BBPOS chose AWS Fargate serverless compute engine to automatically scale containers during peak periods. “With AWS Fargate, we’ve gained unlimited processing power and can support more concurrent connections,” Tang says. BBPOS devices currently support 80,000 concurrent connections and the company aspires to reach 100,000 concurrent connections in the near future. 

BBPOS has built its own containers that it runs with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). The company also uses AWS Lambda to support data analysis and processing. “AWS solutions are a great fit for our microservices architecture,” says Tang. “They provide the flexibility needed for peak computing and allow us to break down our service into smaller pieces. This flexibility allows us to offer a highly available solution to our customers and regularly make incremental improvements.”

Issue prevention and smooth payment processing are crucial in retail. Successful businesses go to great lengths to avoid having customers wait in line, lose patience due to a faulty payment terminal, and forgo their purchase. BBPOS continually monitors the network status for each of its devices to ensure a healthy signal, uploading data to the AWS Cloud in an event-driven manner. To handle the volume of incoming traffic from its IoT devices, the company uses a variety of cloud-native databases. 

BBPOS relies on Amazon DynamoDB as a highly scalable, low-latency NoSQL database for storing logs and documents. With Amazon DynamoDB, BBPOS customers benefit from single-digit millisecond performance even during peak periods. During such times, network traffic can spike tenfold, such as when thousands of customers switch on their devices at the start of business hours. 

Engineers are also using Amazon Elasticsearch Service to support real-time analytics and insight extraction from BBPOS’s IoT devices. Customers can remotely update applications on their devices and immediately confirm whether stores are using the updated version of the app. “Amazon Elasticsearch Service facilitates data integration with customers’ applications in real time, so they know that new data is streaming from the updated app to the backend. This helps our customers’ IT teams plan and test new features quickly and efficiently,” Tang explains.

As mPOS devices are adopted for an increasing variety of tasks, BBPOS plans to expand its reach. With AWS, the company benefits from out-of-the box functionality and the ease of replicating infrastructure across clients and AWS Regions with AWS CloudFormation. In most cases, BBPOS can help a new customer set up its solutions in just one day. 

“AWS offers a wide range of solutions from network to computing, with technology products in IoT, security, and managed databases that provide a strong backup to our SLAs with clients,” says Tang. “We can just pick what we need to offer the best AWS Cloud solution for each customer.”

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