Digitizing Real Estate with Serverless Speed:

Digitizing Real Estate with Serverless Speed: How Nivasa Innovation Scales with AWS Lambda

About the Client

Nivasa Innovation is a pioneering proptech company at the forefront of revolutionizing the real estate industry in Nepal. Their flagship product, Gharlens, is a comprehensive, all-in-one platform designed to simplify the complex world of property management. From centralizing property data and tracking tenant leases to automating rent collection and streamlining digital onboarding, Gharlens provides property managers, builders, and developers with the tools to operate efficiently and scale their portfolios. As Gharlens gained traction, Nivasa Innovation needed a cloud foundation that was not just powerful but also intelligent, agile, and cost-effective.

Growing Pains: The Challenge of Unpredictable Scale

As Nivasa's user base expanded, their team faced significant operational hurdles tied to managing their cloud infrastructure. The real estate market operates in bursts with high-intensity activity during end-of-month rent processing, surges when new property listings go live, and relatively quiet during off-peak times. Managing this with a traditional server-based approach was becoming unsustainable. The challenges included:

• Cost Inefficiency: Provisioning servers for peak traffic meant that expensive compute resources sat idle for much of the month, leading to wasted cloud spend.
• Slow Manual Scaling: Responding to sudden traffic spikes required manual intervention, which was slow and risked a poor user experience, such as lags during critical payment processes.
• Developer Overhead: Engineering talent was being diverted from building innovative features for Gharlens to managing, patching, and scaling servers.
• Operational Complexity: Maintaining consistency across different environments (development, staging, production) was difficult, increasing the risk of configuration errors that could impact platform stability.

Nivasa Innovation realized they needed to move beyond traditional infrastructure management and adopt a model that was inherently built for agility, automatic scaling, and operational excellence.

Simplifying Operations with AWS Lambda

To address these challenges, Nivasa Innovation architected its platform around AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service. Instead of managing servers, their developers could now write and upload code that executes automatically in response to triggers such as an API call from a user or a file upload. AWS handles all the underlying infrastructure management, from provisioning and scaling to patching and maintenance.

Key benefits AWS Lambda brought to Nivasa Innovation include:

• Automatic and Seamless Scaling: Lambda instantly scales to meet demand. Whether one tenant is paying rent or ten thousand are, Lambda runs a separate instance of the function for each request, ensuring consistently fast performance with zero manual intervention.
• Pay-for-Value Cost Optimization: With Lambda's pay-per-use model, Nivasa is only billed for the compute time their code actually runs, down to the millisecond. This completely eliminated the cost of idle servers, turning a fixed operational expense into a variable one that directly tracks platform usage.
• Increased Developer Velocity: By abstracting away the infrastructure, Lambda freed Nivasa’s developers to focus exclusively on writing business logic and building user-facing features for Gharlens. This dramatically accelerated their development cycles and ability to innovate.
• Event-Driven Architecture: Lambda is perfectly suited to the event-based workflows of property management. For example, a tenant completing a digital onboarding form can trigger a Lambda function to process the data, store documents in Amazon S3, update the Amazon Aurora database, and notify the property manager.
• Built-in Fault Tolerance: Lambda runs functions across multiple Availability Zones in an AWS Region, providing high availability and resilience without any complex configuration.

AWS Cloud Architecture

Figure: Gharlens platform architecture powered by AWS Lambda

Nivasa Innovation’s architecture is a modern, secure, and highly automated system designed for resilience and performance.

1. Global Entry Point & Web Security

This layer ensures that property managers and tenants can access the Gharlens platform quickly and securely from anywhere.

• Amazon Route 53: Provides highly available and scalable DNS routing. When a user navigates to the Gharlens website, Route 53 directs their request to the optimal endpoint.
• Amazon CloudFront: As a global Content Delivery Network (CDN), CloudFront caches static content closer to users, dramatically reducing latency and improving the user experience. It checks whether the content is cached; if it is, CloudFront serves the static content directly from its edge locations, which are strategically distributed based on Gharlens' customer base.
• AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall): This is the platform's first line of defense, every incoming request passes first through WAF. WAF inspects all incoming web traffic and filters out malicious requests, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, protecting the application and user data.

2. The Serverless Application Core

This is the heart of the Gharlens platform, where business logic is executed in a highly scalable and event-driven manner.

• Amazon API Gateway: Acts as the "front door" for the application. It is the entry point for all RESTful API calls in Gharlens. It manages all API requests, handling authentication, throttling, and routing them to the appropriate backend service.
• AWS Lambda: This is the primary compute engine. A suite of specialized Lambda functions handles all the core functionalities of Gharlens: processing rent payments, managing tenant information, updating vacancy statuses, generating reports, and handling digital onboarding workflows. Each function is a small, independent unit, making the system easy to update and maintain. Here, after the stateless function handles the logic then it reads/writes data to Amazon Aurora(for structured data like users, properties, leases) and Amazon S3(for images, documents, backups). Lambda functions also trigger Notifications, Events to S3 or call Amazon EC2.

3. Data Storage & Specialized Compute

This layer provides secure, durable, and scalable data storage and handles any workloads not suited for a brief, serverless execution.

• Amazon Aurora: A MySQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud. Aurora provides the performance and availability of commercial databases at a fraction of the cost. It stores all of Gharlens' critical structured data, including property details, tenant records, lease agreements, and financial transactions, all within a secure private subnet.
• Amazon EC2: For any specialized, long-running processes that may be required (such as complex data analytics or batch jobs), EC2 instances are available within the private subnet. This gives Nivasa the flexibility to use traditional virtual servers when needed, without exposing them directly to the internet. EC2 securely accesses Aurora and S3.
• Amazon S3: Used for scalable object storage. This is where Gharlens stores files like lease documents, property photos, and application backups. S3 also serves as an event source, triggering Lambda functions for processing uploaded files, validating the document, extracting metadata and creating entries in Aurora.

4. Monitoring, Auditing & Compliance

This set of services provides deep visibility into the platform's health and security posture.

• Amazon CloudWatch: CloudWatch acts as the central nervous system for monitoring. It collects logs, metrics, and events from every part of the architecture, including Lambda, API Gateway, Aurora, and EC2. The Nivasa team uses CloudWatch to create dashboards, monitor performance, and set alarms that automatically notify them of any anomalies or errors. It aggregates logs across the Gharlens architecture and generates alerts, dashboards, and alarms to detect and respond to anomalies.
• AWS CloudTrail: Provides a complete audit trail of all API calls made within the AWS account. Then, this helps with security audits, troubleshooting, and compliance reviews.

5. CI/CD & Infrastructure Automation

Nivasa embraces a full DevOps culture with an automated pipeline that ensures fast, safe, and reliable deployments.

• GitHub: All application and infrastructure code is stored and version-controlled in GitHub. GitHub triggers to start the pipeline
• AWS CodePipeline: This service orchestrates the entire release process. When a developer pushes code to GitHub, CodePipeline automatically initiates the build, test, and deployment sequence. It pulls the code from GitHub, sends it to CodeBuild for compilation and testing, deploys it using CodeDeploy, and updates the infrastructure via CloudFormation.
• AWS CodeBuild: Takes the source code and runs builds and tests in a fully managed environment. It runs tests, builds the lambda and EC2 packages.
• AWS CodeDeploy: Automates the deployment of the new code to AWS Lambda, managing traffic shifting and providing a mechanism for easy rollbacks if an issue is detected. This ensures updates are deployed with minimal to no downtime.
• AWS CloudFormation: The entire infrastructure, VPCs, subnets, databases, IAM roles, and more is defined as code in CloudFormation templates. This enables Nivasa to create, update, and replicate their entire environment consistently and reliably, eliminating manual errors.

The Results: Unlocking Agility and Growth

• Over 70% reduction in monthly infrastructure costs by eliminating idle server resources and leveraging the pay-per-use model of Lambda.
• Zero-downtime scalability to effortlessly handle peak loads, such as end-of-month rent processing, ensuring a smooth user experience.
• 50% faster deployment cycles, allowing the engineering team to roll out new features and bug fixes more rapidly.
• Near-zero server management overhead, freeing up developers to innovate and enhance the Gharlens platform.

With a robust, scalable, and cost-efficient foundation powered by AWS Lambda, Nivasa Innovation is perfectly positioned to lead the digital transformation of Nepal's real estate market, scaling their platform to onboard thousands of new properties without ever worrying about their infrastructure's limits.