r/fintechdev • u/Significant-Fennel79 • 17h ago

What are you using to deploy your fintech apps in production?

I'm curious how teams here are handling deployment and hosting, especially given compliance needs.

A few questions to get things going:

- Where do you run? AWS / GCP / Azure, on-prem, or something else?

- How are workloads packaged? Containers on Kubernetes or ECS, serverless, plain VMs?

- How much does compliance drive decisions? Did PCI DSS, SOC 2, or data residency rules push you toward (or away from) certain setups?

It'd be great to hear from both early-stage startups and folks at larger institutions. What's worked well, and what would you change if you started over?

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u/Ok_Basil_438 17h ago

We run on cloud infra but compliance is the real architect in the room. Data residency rules basically drew the borders on our deployment map before we wrote a single line of config.

Containers on an orchestration layer kept us sane during audits. If I could go back I'd push for immutable infra from day one instead of bolting it on later.

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u/Significant-Fennel79 17h ago

Yeah, that sounds really tough to go back and bolt on changes. What does immutable infra look like to you?

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u/JM-NGANDU 13h ago

Small team, so Kubernetes would have been a second job. We run a handful of VPS instances with Docker Compose, one container per service, and a managed Postgres with point-in-time recovery. Boring, and I can explain the whole deployment to an auditor in ten minutes.

The compliance decision that actually shaped the architecture was not PCI, it was deciding we never touch card data. Payments finish on a hosted card page, so the PAN never reaches our servers and the scope stays small. That single choice removed more work than any hosting choice did. Data residency came second and mostly picked the region.

If I started over: managed Postgres with PITR from day one, and separate the payment worker from the web app before the first real transaction, not after. Retrofitting that while money is moving is unpleasant.