Evolving ADP’s Single Global Experience in MyADP and ADP Mobile Using AWS Lambda

ADP processes payments for one in six American workers, and the company is expanding globally. To meet quality and latency goals, the company is committed to consolidating, standardizing, and modernizing its application, which is used by over 17 million people and more than 470,000 companies. Although ADP Mobile and MyADP are used as the delivery mechanism for all ADP services, the company wanted to present a more consistent brand to customers with a unified global experience for common pillars like payroll, benefits, retirement, and taxes. 

ADP had to innovate to create a single experience for disparate systems of record without introducing error. “The speed at which pay statements open up should be the same speed at which benefits enrollment open, but these are two different sources of content on two different sets of infrastructure,” says Devi Ramachandran, senior director of DevOps at ADP. “That’s been our challenge from the beginning, and migrating our systems to AWS made everything simpler.” ADP also had to simplify the ADP Mobile and MyADP application programming interface (API) access that is provided by those different infrastructures. To streamline data aggregation on the backend, the company used AWS AppSync, which creates serverless GraphQL and Pub/Sub APIs that simplify application development. Using AWS AppSync, ADP can bring together data from the various backends and sources into a single endpoint.

ADP used AWS tools to resolve challenges within its application. The company required a solution that could scale seamlessly to accommodate the rush of workers that clock in during a 90-second window around the beginning of each hour. However, ADP’s prior system took 60 seconds to scale as traffic doubled. Engineers worked quickly to develop a proof of concept using AWS Fargate, a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute solution that scaled rapidly. ADP uses AWS Fargate in tandem with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service for containerized applications. “We’re using AWS because we want to be a product development team and not an infrastructure management team,” says Ramachandran. As part of the application modernization, ADP started to build a new generation of microservices in AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service. ADP further increased resiliency by deploying in multiple availability zones. After the migration, the team began optimizing costs. “Today, we are using AWS solutions like a Ferrari, but we’re paying the price of a regular car because of our serverless architecture,” says Ramachandran. In addition to saving money, ADP has increased staff productivity. Before using AWS, product developers had to coordinate and align with multiple internal teams to troubleshoot issues with databases and other resources. After migrating to managed services on AWS, development teams own their resources fully, and the company now spends much less time on support and maintenance. 

After migrating to AWS, ADP adopted AWS AppSync to bolster the reliability of the application and offer a better experience with offline-first design. By designing an offline-first architecture, the team is developing a solution that pushes ADP Mobile and MyADP data to user devices as new data becomes available. This approach makes the application more resilient to faults and gives users access to recently updated data even if their network connection is slow. 

The application users—the employees of ADP client companies—are benefiting from ADP innovations, which include intelligent self-service and chatbot functionality in some regions. The increased flexibility that ADP now offers means that the application maintains a 4.5 rating from users on mobile application marketplaces. With a new, unified user experience, time to market has been reduced, and the company can onboard new clients more quickly. ADP has also accelerated feature delivery substantially. Its teams are happy to be able to focus on what they do best. “Using AWS solutions, the talent on our team is doing actual product engineering work instead of worrying about infrastructure,” says Ramachandran.