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CASE STUDY

Alistair Group

Cloud native application scales for rapid growth and drastically streamlines the operations process

Alistair Group 1
alistair-videocover

Rapid growth presents operations challenges

Alistair Group is an East Africa based logistics company that helps customers move 650,000 tons of cargo per year across 14 countries. As their operation expanded, they quickly outgrew their existing tools and needed a solution to help manage their group of contractors, drivers, trucks, trailers, and load assignments.

Industry

Logistics

Challenge

Develop proprietary serverless application on AWS to manage subcontractor fleet

Services & Tech

Cloud Infrastructure, Serverless, Cloud Native Application Development

AWS helps scale for rapid growth & streamline operations

Onica worked alongside the team at Alistair Group to help build a proprietary serverless application on AWS to manage their subcontractor fleet of hundreds of trucks and drivers as they delivered cargo to their customers. The introduction of a new application drastically streamlined and automated their operations process as truck drivers were able to receive assignments, report and monitor progress, and automatically report driver performance metrics on the go.

OUTCOMES

AWS Transforms Operations

Onica worked with Alistair Group to quickly develop the business use case for building their custom application in a sprint-based, iterative approach. Rather than starting with a web server to host the application, Onica started with Amazon API Gateway and hosted a REST API. Our team built the user interface using Angular technology to achieve a streamlined and responsive web experience. On the backend, AWS Lambda was utilized to host all of the application logic and Amazon DynamoDB to store data at persistent state. In addition, Amazon Elasticsearch was introduced to help with full text search capabilities, as well as analyzing time series data that was collected from their subcontractor fleet of trucks.

This development model kept costs low as Alistair Group scaled up, but allowed flexibility to scale down when they needed to without having to re-architect later, because the scalable cloud architecture was there from day one to support any workload they might throw at it.

Technologies leveraged:

  • Amazon Cognito was used to authenticate administrator, fleet managers, and drivers
  • RESTful API implemented via Amazon API Gateway was leveraged with custom authorizers
  • AWS Lambda functions backed each API call
  • Amazon DynamoDB was used as the primary transactional data store
  • A subset of data was replicated (via Amazon DynamoDB streams and AWS Lambda) to Amazon Elasticsearch Service for richer reporting, metrics, and search functionality
  • Angular was used for the frontend web application
  • An Android app is used by all of the drivers
  • SNS sends push notifications to drivers for new load assignments

WHY US

Why Onica

Onica is a large and fast-growing Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Consulting Partner, helping companies enable, operate, and innovate on the cloud. From migration strategy to operational excellence, cloud native development, and immersive transformation, Onica is a full spectrum AWS integrator. Learn more at www.onica.com.