Alistair Group moves 650,000 tons of cargo per year across 14 countries using serverless applications on AWS.
A custom application keeps costs low for this East Africa-based logistics company, while allowing flexibility to scale up and down as needed.
Industry
Automotive, Transportation, Logistics
Challenge
Develop proprietary serverless application on AWS to manage subcontractor fleet
Solutions Cloud Adoption & Migration, Application Management & Operations, Cloud Native Development Platforms Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS)Our customer
Alistair Group is an East Africa based logistics company that helps customers move 650,000 tons of cargo per year across 14 countries.
The obstacles they faced
As its operations expanded, the company quickly outgrew its existing tools and needed a solution to help manage a large group of contractors, drivers, trucks, trailers and load assignments.
How we helped
AWS helps scale for rapid growth & streamline operations
Rackspace Technology worked alongside the team at Alistair Group to help build a proprietary serverless application on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to manage a subcontractor fleet of hundreds of trucks and drivers as they delivered cargo to their customers.
The introduction of the new application drastically streamlined and automated its operations as truck drivers were able to receive assignments, report and monitor progress, and automatically report driver performance metrics on-the-go.
What we achieved together
AWS Transforms Operations
Rackspace Technology 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, Rackspace 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 Alistair Group's subcontractor fleet of trucks.
This development model kept costs low as Alistair Group scaled up, but allowed flexibility to scale down when it needed to, without having to re-architect later, because the scalable cloud architecture was there from day one to support any workload that might be thrown at it.
Technologies leveraged:
- Amazon Cognito was used to authenticate administrators, 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
About Rackspace Technology
Rackspace Technology is a hybrid, multicloud solutions expert. We combine our expertise with the world’s leading technologies — across AI, applications, data and security — to deliver end-to-end solutions. We have a proven record of advising customers based on their business challenges, designing solutions that scale, building and managing those solutions, and optimizing returns into the future.
As a global hybrid, multicloud technology services pioneer, we deliver innovative capabilities to help customers build new revenue streams, increase efficiency and create incredible experiences. Named a best place to work, year after year according to Fortune, Forbes and Glassdoor, we attract and develop world-class talent to deliver the best expertise to our customers. Everything we do is wrapped in Fanatical Experience® — our obsession with customer success that drives us to help each customer work faster, smarter and stay ahead of what’s next.
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