Alistair Group moves 650,000 tons of cargo per year across 14 countries using serverless applications on AWS.

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.

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