Paynest's Cloud Transformation Journey with The Pinnacle Group Inc.

About Paynest

Paynest is an emerging leader in digital payroll and HRMS solutions, catering to growing businesses that seek automation, compliance, and transparency in employee management. From salary processing and tax compliance to leave and attendance tracking - Paynest delivers it all from a single dashboard. As their platform started scaling and onboarding more clients across India and the Middle East, they began to face some fundamental challenges around performance, scalability, and infrastructure management.

The Challenge

As the number of concurrent users on the platform increased, so did the pressure on their monolithic backend architecture. During peak salary processing hours or bulk report generations, APIs became noticeably slow, often taking up to 6-8 seconds for responses. This was primarily because the system made repetitive read queries to the MySQL database, which eventually throttled the available IOPS capacity. Adding more read replicas wasn't solving the problem and increasing cost.

To add to the issue, the architecture lacked a dedicated caching layer, meaning frequently accessed data (like employee profiles, tax slabs, and payslip summaries) had to be fetched from RDS again and again. Since their RDS database was placed in a public subnet, it also posed long-term security concerns. The business needed an urgent solution that could not only solve these immediate performance issues but also prepare them for future scalability, DevOps integration, and security best practices.

The Solution by The Pinnacle Group Inc.

After conducting a detailed architectural assessment, the cloud experts at The Pinnacle Group Inc. proposed a fully managed, scalable, and secure solution built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The new design focused on introducing a caching layer using Amazon ElastiCache, moving the database to a private subnet, and offloading heavy workloads via Lambda and ECS.

All compute services - including Amazon EC2 (for long-running backend APIs), AWS Lambda (for asynchronous operations), and Amazon ECS (for containerized microservices) - were hosted in a secure public subnet with restricted access and role-based permissions. The core MySQL database on Amazon RDS was placed in a private subnet with no direct exposure, and connected securely using VPC routing and security groups.

An Amazon ElastiCache Redis cluster was introduced as an intelligent caching layer. All high-frequency read operations - such as fetching employee details, leave balances, and past payslip data - now first go through the cache. Only in case of a cache miss is the data fetched from RDS, ensuring that database load is minimal. On data updates or new payroll runs, Lambda functions refresh the corresponding cache entries, keeping data real-time and consistent.

Architecture Highlights

• Amazon RDS (MySQL) as the transactional store, isolated in a private subnet
• Amazon ElastiCache for ultra-fast caching of frequent queries
• Amazon EC2 & ECS for backend services with load balancing and autoscaling
• AWS Lambda for automated cache refresh and background jobs
• AWS VPC with public-private subnet segregation for security
• IAM Roles, Security Groups and encrypted connections for data protection

This hybrid setup ensured both speed and security - exactly what Paynest needed to scale confidently.

Results & Impact

The impact was immediate and measurable. After implementation, the platform saw a 50-60% drop in database read load, which directly translated to faster API response times. The average request latency dropped below 1 second across key endpoints. Additionally, their AWS bills became more optimized since unnecessary RDS IOPS were significantly reduced.

From a security standpoint, all critical services were now safely running in private subnets, with no exposure to the public internet. IAM roles and fine-grained access ensured that only required services and users could reach sensitive resources.

Final Thoughts

By partnering with The Pinnacle Group Inc., Paynest not only solved their immediate technical bottlenecks but also future-proofed their platform. Their AWS-powered architecture now supports high concurrency, delivers lightning-fast performance, and ensures enterprise-grade security - giving them a competitive edge in the HRMS space.