Showpad simplifies connectivity and security using Amazon VPC Lattice

Showpad’s architecture spans hundreds of microservices distributed across Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts, organized into separate environments for development, staging, and production. To connect these services, resources, and accounts, the company had built a custom networking solution based on network load balancers, private hosted zones, and standard virtual private cloud (VPC) endpoints.

As the solution grew to nearly 200 services, connectivity became increasingly fragmented, making it difficult for teams to reliably discover and connect services across environments and accounts. At the same time, teams adopted inconsistent approaches to authentication, limiting Showpad’s ability to enforce a unified zero-trust model and increasing operational overhead.

To simplify connectivity and standardize security, Showpad turned to Amazon VPC Lattice. By adopting a managed application networking layer, the company replaced custom-built integrations with consistent, service-level connectivity, built-in authentication, and centralized policy control. This shift reduced architectural complexity, strengthened its zero-trust posture, and freed engineering teams to focus on building customer-facing features instead of maintaining networking infrastructure.

“We want an excellent provider for networking and storage; we don’t want to reinvent them,” says Jeroen Minnaert, vice president of software architecture at Showpad. “Strategically, we’re building on top of AWS as much as possible so that we can spend more time innovating for our customers and less time maintaining infrastructure.”

Showpad first selected pilot services to validate that Amazon VPC Lattice could support its diverse architecture. After this was confirmed, Showpad deployed its full catalog of services onto Amazon VPC Lattice.

The original custom network and the new Amazon VPC Lattice network ran side by side, letting Showpad test connectivity without routing live customer traffic through the new setup. Once it was validated, the company redirected its DNS records from the original network load balancers to Amazon VPC Lattice.

At the same time, Showpad standardized its approach to application security. Previously, teams used a mix of authentication methods, making it difficult to enforce consistency. By integrating AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM), which manages identities and access to AWS services and resources, the company established a unified, identity-based model for securing internal traffic. “We wanted to solve application communication consistently,” says Hannes Swimberghe, principal cloud engineer at Showpad. “Amazon VPC Lattice integrates with AWS IAM to authenticate traffic, which facilitates secure, consistent application communication.”

To accelerate adoption, Showpad’s CloudOps team developed reusable constructs using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), defining cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. Engineers can now onboard new services to the network with just a few lines of code, eliminating manual configuration and reducing operational overhead.

Amazon VPC Lattice connects services across compute types, including Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service, and AWS Lambda functions, which are used to run code without thinking about servers or clusters. It also extends to transmission control protocol resources, such as domain names, IP addresses, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), an easy-to-manage relational database service, across VPCs and accounts. This breadth means Showpad can connect services without regard for underlying infrastructure.

The service also reaches workloads running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers the broadest and deepest compute platform, and containerized applications on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which is used to build, run, and scale production-ready Kubernetes applications. Instead of relying on multiple tools or frameworks that are tied to specific compute environments, the team now uses a single, managed layer for service discovery, routing, and authentication. This simplifies connectivity at scale and empowers developers to focus on building applications rather than stitching together networking solutions.

Since completing the migration, Showpad’s engineering teams have seen significant gains in productivity and development speed. Engineers can now onboard new services to the network in 1 hour using AWS CDK constructs, down from a full day. Showpad’s engineering teams have now introduced a preview environment capability: a production-replica setup that lets engineers safely deploy and test changes against a production-like environment on demand. This significantly accelerated validation cycles and reduced time to market from months to weeks.

The new setup also streamlined the prototyping of AI features, since engineers can access required services quickly and securely through Amazon VPC Lattice without waiting on networking configurations. This was highlighted when an engineering manager prototyped an AI workflow in just a few hours.

Showpad consolidated five authentication methods into a single, identity-based model, standardizing zero-trust security across all applications and reducing costs by removing redundant components. The company is now exploring ways to extend Amazon VPC Lattice into agentic AI architectures so that AI agents can access only the endpoints that they are authorized to use.

“Amazon VPC Lattice works in the background,” says Jeroen. “It doesn’t require maintenance, and it doesn’t pose hurdles. We are very happy with this service.”