How we reduced deployment times by 95%

We reduced deployment times for our bank integration service from over 30 minutes to 1.5 minutes by implementing a custom "fast deployments" mechanism that utilizes the node require cache to "hot reload" application code at runtime, allowing us to bypass the latency present in ECS deploys and fine-tune our entire deployment process. This approach enabled us to ship features and bug fixes more quickly, minimize engineering time wasted on context switching and monitoring dashboards, and increase the velocity of Plaid's integrations work.