Base2Services deploys serverless computing on AWS for Victorian emergency services app

Melbourne-based AWS partner base2Services has helped deploy and maintain serverless technology from AWS for the Emergency Management Victoria's (EMV) new application that not only reduces costs, but allows for millions of users to receive updates on natural disasters.

EMV supports organisations that provide safety services in Victoria during emergencies like fires, flood, and storms. EMV used a mobile application to share information between these organisations and the community that ran on a three-tier server-based Java environment.

The app was struggling to scale quickly during an emergency, and could only support 1 million users at a time. It also ran at a high cost and required heavy infrastructure management.

To keep up with the demand, EMV decided to create a new mobile application and website that would be extremely scalable and highly available during peak periods while keeping costs down during non-peak periods.

EMV wanted to build the new solution using serverless technologies from AWS to support the app based on previous projects it worked on in partnership with base2Services, including multiple DevOps-as-a-service projects.

The app had three major requirements: 99.9 percent availability during peak fire periods (November to March) while supporting thousands of users, utilise serverless technologies from third parties, and cut down on costs.

It was a first for both base2Services and EMV delivering an entire project using serverless technology, and it utilised products from AWS such as Lambda, API Gateway, S3, SNS, SQS and Dynamo DB. Base2services also introduced Cloudwatch and monitoring tools to ensure critical services levels.

After completing the project in two six-week phases, the new app can now support thousands of users at a moment's notice. It has reduced operational expenditure by removing the need for additional infrastructure capacity during peak periods and the need for additional operational and maintenance staff.

The new application can support several million users at once and can send 1.2 million messages per minute.

EMV chief architect Michael Jenkins said base2Services provided a lot of feedback and advice during the process, as well as ongoing infrastructure support.

"And we have leaned very heavily on their expertise, both during the initial design and conception of these new systems as well as while we rolled them out into production,” he said.

Base2Services is a finalist in the Customer Experience category at the 2017 CRN Impact Awards. The full list of finalists will be announced at our CRN Pipeline conference in Melbourne on 22-23 March. The winners will be announced at the Impact Awards dinner during the CRN Pipeline conference in Sydney on 6-7 April.

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