Using AWS, Companies House Maintains Register of 4 Million Businesses

Companies House runs virus checks against documents for late-filing applications without the need for managing servers by using AWS Lambda. Companies House maintains a register of limited companies in the UK. Document uploads to Amazon S3 trigger AWS Lambda to scan the materials for viruses.

Companies House keeps a register of all limited companies in the UK. It’s responsible for incorporating and dissolving limited companies, examining and storing company information, and making it available to the public. Currently, the register contains data on more than four million companies.

Companies House runs the Companies House Service (CHS) on the AWS Cloud. CHS, which receives approximately eight billion requests for companies’ data annually, allows users to access company information for free.  

Companies House recently saved $140,000 a year when it moved CHS to smaller Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RI). 

Each registered company has a deadline for filing accounts, and sometimes, they need to apply for a deadline extension. To save time, they can upload documents to support the application via CHS. Companies House, however, needs to check the documents for viruses.

“We are a large public service. We have to take virus and malware threats seriously,” says Ross Maude, director of digital at Companies House.

Companies House protects the process for filing extensions with AWS Lambda, which lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. AWS Lambda triggers scans when the extension documents are uploaded to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

In the past month, 85 companies uploaded documents. Using AWS Lambda, Companies House ran virus checks against each document without having to administer a server, and because Companies House didn’t exceed one million AWS Lambda requests that month, the cost of running the checks was zero.

Steve Bowen, head of platform engineering at Companies House, says, “There are no management overheads. AWS Lambda scales automatically to the number of uploads, and we start paying only after exceeding one million requests per month. We are planning for AWS Lambda to be part of our continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline. The service will save us time because all deployments are currently manual.”