Case Study: AlbaTherium — Scalable Backend for Real-Time SaaS Operations
Overview
Client: AlbaTherium — a platform offering advanced tools for traders. albatherium.com
Industry: Fintech / Trading Tools / SaaS
Project: Build a robust backend panel to support operations, user management, and real-time metrics, with a high standard of security and scalability.
Challenges
Before the improvements:
Lack of real-time visibility into system health, usage statistics, and user behavior made it difficult to quickly respond to incidents or adapt features.
Inefficient user / permission management which risked internal security issues and slowed down administrative tasks.
Scalability concerns: as user base and data grow, existing architecture could not guarantee low latency or reliable uptime under higher loads.
Security gaps: given that AlbaTherium deals with financial/trading tools, strong security in both application layer and infra was non-negotiable.
Objectives
Provide real-time dashboards & metrics for system health (CPU, memory, response times), user activity, and critical business KPIs (e.g. subscriptions, usage rates).
Implement a role-based access control (RBAC) or similar permission framework so that different admin users have exactly the controls needed—not more, not less.
Ensure the backend is secure, resilient, and adheres to best practices (authentication, authorization, encryption, audit logs, etc.).
Architect for scalability and maintainability, so that further feature expansions, higher volumes, or integration needs can be met easily.
Solution & Implementation
Technology Stack & Architecture
Built on Node.js (Express or NestJS type structure) for API layer; using a microservices or modular architecture to isolate concerns (user management, metrics, business logic, etc.).
Real-time processing with WebSockets or server-sent events (SSE) to push live updates of metrics to the dashboard.
Database(s) chosen for different loads: e.g. relational DB (Postgres / MySQL) for user data, audit logs; time-series or NoSQL DB (InfluxDB, Prometheus, or MongoDB) for metrics / telemetry.
Metrics & Monitoring
Instrumented key components to capture performance metrics: request/response timings, API error rates, throughput, server resource usage.
Dashboards set up via tools like Grafana / Kibana or custom UI panels to display real-time graphs and alerts.
Alerts configured (via email / Slack / PagerDuty) for thresholds (e.g. CPU > 80%, error rate spikes).
User Management & Security Controls
Role-Based Access Control: admin, moderator, auditor etc. Each role with fine-grained permissions (e.g. view only, edit, delete, configuration).
We developed a enabling real-time metrics, role-based security controls, and seamless user management designed for the scale and speed SaaS trading operations.