A freight network that settles in real time
Retired a fragile nightly batch for an event-driven settlement engine on DynamoDB Streams and EventBridge. Invoices that once took a day now clear in seconds.
- Event-driven
- DynamoDB
- EventBridge
- Step Functions
- 18h → 4s
- Settlement time
- −62%
- Run-rate cost
- 0
- Reconciliation breaks
Every environment is the same typed CDK app with a different context — adding a settlement lane is a config change, not a code change. Changes promote dev → staging → prod behind a manual approval, and a rollback is one deploy back.
Atlas moved freight across three thousand carriers, but money moved once a night. A monolithic batch reconciled loads, tariffs, and fuel surcharges in a four-hour window — and when a single carrier feed arrived late or malformed, the whole run failed. Finance started its day not knowing what had settled, disputes piled up, and every new lane meant another hand-written branch in a job nobody wanted to touch.
We modelled settlement as a stream of facts rather than a job. Every load event lands in a single DynamoDB table; a Streams consumer projects it into ledger entries and emits domain events onto EventBridge. Pricing, surcharge, and dispute logic became small, independently deployable Lambdas that subscribe to exactly the events they care about. A Step Functions workflow orchestrates the few genuinely sequential steps — invoice assembly and carrier payout — with explicit compensation paths, so a bad feed quarantines one load instead of halting the network. The whole thing is one CDK app with typed contracts shared end to end.
Settlement went from an overnight gamble to a continuous, observable flow. A load now clears in about four seconds from the carrier ping, finance watches it happen on a live board, and adding a lane is a config change rather than a code change. With no idle batch infrastructure, run-rate cost fell sixty-two percent — and in the first two quarters there was not a single reconciliation break.
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