Alertive API: Serverless Messaging Infrastructure

The Challenge

Alertive needed a scalable, secure API to power their enterprise messaging platform. The system had to handle real-time alerts, task assignments, and conversation management while integrating seamlessly with existing XMPP infrastructure. Most importantly, it needed to support multiple environments and provide a robust integration framework for third-party systems.

The Solution

We developed a production-ready serverless API using AWS Lambda and API Gateway, providing a reliable foundation for Alertive's messaging ecosystem. The API enables organizations to automate communication workflows through a clean REST interface, backed by comprehensive OpenAPI documentation.

Key Deliverables

OAuth 2.0 Authentication Flow
Implemented secure client credentials authentication with multi-environment support, enabling partners to integrate safely across testing, staging, and production environments.

Conversation Management API
Built complete CRUD operations for conversation lifecycle management—creating alerts and tasks, retrieving message history, updating conversations, and managing participant escalations.

Schema-Driven Validation
Developed an automated build pipeline that generates JSON schemas from the OpenAPI specification, ensuring runtime validation stays synchronized with API documentation. This eliminated a common source of integration errors.

Flexible Integration System
Created an extensible metadata framework with integration_actions and extra_attributes, allowing clients to trigger custom workflows and attach context-specific data to conversations.

Security Hardening
Added HSTS headers, implemented validation against SSRF vulnerabilities, and enabled point-in-time recovery on DynamoDB tables, meeting enterprise security requirements.

Technical Approach

The serverless architecture provides automatic scaling and cost efficiency—clients only pay for actual usage. We optimized Lambda cold starts through lazy-loading and connection caching, maintaining sub-second response times even during traffic spikes.

Our CI/CD pipeline runs comprehensive Jest tests on every commit, performs security audits, and automates deployment to staging. Production deployments use a manual approval gate, giving Alertive full control over release timing.

Results

The Alertive API now serves as the integration backbone for enterprise messaging workflows. The schema validation system has reduced integration errors by catching issues at development time, while the OpenAPI-first approach has accelerated partner onboarding with clear, testable contracts.

The serverless infrastructure has proven both reliable and cost-effective, automatically handling variable load patterns without manual intervention.

Technologies: Node.js 20, AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, XMPP, OAuth 2.0, JSON Schema, Jest, Bitbucket Pipelines, AWS SAM