Building Innward: A B2B Hospitality Operating System with Vercel and Amazon Aurora
This blog post is created for the purposes of entering the Hack the Zero Stack with Vercel v0 and AWS Databases hackathon. #H0Hackathon Building Innward: A B2B Hospitality Operating System with Vercel and Amazon Aurora The hospitality industry is notorious for relying on "legacy" software—clunky, slow, and disconnected. For the Hack the Zero Stack hackathon, I set out to build Innward , a modern, AI-ready Property Management System (PMS) that proves you can build enterprise-grade B2B tools in record time using Vercel v0 and AWS Databases. The Vision: Moving Beyond the Spreadsheet Hotel managers don't just need a place to store "Room 101: Occupied." They need to solve the "Hidden Math" of revenue management. This means: Relational Complexity: Linking dates, room groups, and individual stays. Dynamic Pricing: Deriving rates based on occupancy and logic-based rules. Market Intelligence: Real-time benchmarking against competitors. The "Zero Stack": Vercel + Amazon Aurora To handle this complexity, I chose Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL (Serverless v2) . Why Aurora for B2B? In a B2B SaaS environment, data isolation and relational integrity are non-negotiable. Aurora provided the robust relational power needed to join complex pricing tables while scaling automatically as more hotels (tenants) join the platform. The Zero-Secret Architecture One of the most rewarding parts of this build was implementing the AWS RDS Signer . Following the "Zero Stack" philosophy, I moved away from static database passwords. Innward uses IAM-based authentication to communicate between Vercel and AWS. By utilizing the @aws-sdk/rds-signer , the application generates short-lived tokens on the fly. This means even if an environment variable were leaked, the database remains locked tight. // lib/db.ts snippet const signer = new Signer ({ credentials : awsCredentialsProvider ({ roleArn : process . env . AWS_ROLE_ARN ! , clientConfig : { region : process . env . AWS_REGION }, }), region : process . env .