TagB:  A scalable parking and valet management system

About TagB

Tag B Group is well-known transportation, parking, garage management, and valet service provider based in Washington, D.C. It wanted to create a scalable solution to maintain a full parking and valet management system for multiple users.

To address our client’s challenges, Simform provided a comprehensive AWS DevOps solution that included:

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using AWS CloudFormation: Simform automated the client’s infrastructure provisioning and management using AWS CloudFormation, which enabled the client to easily scale its infrastructure up or down based on demand.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) using Jenkins hosted on AWS EC2 instance: Simform automated the client’s deployment processes on multiple environments with additional checks on code quality and unit testing, ensuring faster and more reliable releases with a lower risk of downtime.

Monitoring and alerting using AWS CloudWatch: Simform optimized the client’s monitoring and alerting processes using AWS CloudWatch, which enabled the client to proactively identify and address issues before they affected end-users.

Our AWS DevOps solution delivered the following results for our client:

Improved scalability: With our automated infrastructure provisioning and management using AWS CloudFormation, our client was able to easily scale its infrastructure up or down based on demand.

Faster and more reliable releases: Our CI/CD pipeline using AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeDeploy enabled our client to deploy changes faster and with a lower risk of downtime. Mean time to recover (MTTR) increases by 10x with faster rollbacks.

Proactive monitoring and issue resolution: Our monitoring and alerting using AWS CloudWatch enabled our client to proactively identify and address issues before they affected end-users.

With Simform’s AWS DevOps solution, our client was able to improve its infrastructure scalability, increase deployment speed and reliability, and proactively monitor and address issues. As a result, our client was able to provide a better user experience for its customers, increase its revenue, and achieve a competitive edge in the e-commerce market.

Pipeline Overview

• Amazon RDS:Amazon RDS was employed to store application and user data, including user account information, parking lot information, license plate number recording, and so on. 
• Amazon ECS: Containerized APIs were developed and hosted in Amazon ECS, that is used by front-end applications. For delivering new modules and updates, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) manages the application’s microservices backend. Examples include various modules and functionalities such as advanced parking booking, payment and refund administration, parking lot creation, etc. 
• AWS Task Definition: Task definition gives commands to ECS; for example, each task will have certain configurations such as data volumes, memory utilization required, and a number of containers required. 
• AWS Lambda & Lambda Edge Security Headers: The main function of AWS Lambda function is to compress users’ profile pictures. Lambda edge security headers add a security layer when content is displayed using CloudFront from an S3 bucket. For example, several users will book parking spots from various places using the app, posing a significant security concern. 
• S3 Bucket: Documents belonging to various users, such as administrators, customers, and clients, were stored in an S3 bucket. Clients of Tag B, for example, will have access to data on revenue tracking, parking spots, and booking slots. These individuals will register as customers on the site and will need to upload documents, which will be stored in S3. 
• Amazon CloudFront: CloudFront was used to distribute static and dynamic content across the application frontends. It helped create customized user experiences and deliver content with high speed using its edge computing capabilities across multiple channels. CloudFront distribution, for example, pulls files from S3 and displays them in the frontend, as indicated in the diagram. Also, it chooses and restricts access to particular information for specific people. For example, admin users can not access the company’s financial information. 
• AWS SES & SNS: AWS SES is a service that sends emails to users. An email will be sent to the user after a successful registration with the application, for example. Alternatively, bills will be delivered through email after consumers make a payment. Users receive notifications from AWS SNS. Notifications for communications about offers, payment refunds, pass expiration, and other topics will be sent. 
• Amazon ECR: Docker images were stored in Amazon Elastic Registry(ECR) for deployments. 
• Application Load Balancer: In the case of multiple requests from different users worldwide, the application load balancer distributes traffic across various targets, such as EC2 instances of ECS containers in multiple availability zones. 
• Monitoring: CloudWatch is used to keep track of infrastructure-related logs, metrics, and data, while CloudTrail is used to keep track of operational actions in AWS accounts. 
• AWS certificate manager: Acm service used for controlling all of the traffic with TLS protection with data served with Load Balancer and CloudFront.
• Autoscaling: Esc service with ec2 launch type is configured with auto scaling group thus we have proper resource utilization
• AWS WAF: Web application firewall with custom and managed rule to protect CDN and LB for common types of attack in web application service.
• Amazon Pinpoint: With the help of Amazon Pinpoint we are serving ios and android push notifications.
  
• Amazon ROUTE53: All domain related services are served by route53 with more than 25 DNS zones.