An app that helps streamline the on-field work

The client is a U.S. based full-service organization that takes contracts for installing and commissioning audiovisual and videoconferencing solutions. The company started in 2000 and is now considered as one of the top AV/IT services companies in the United States today. The platform supports many top national and regional AV/IT systems integrators in the United States.

• The process of tracking the activities of field technicians was inefficient as it was a manual paper-based one.
• Inability to track the bounced emails.
• Low reliability due to excessive workloads.
• Expensive manual process that wasted many man-hours
• Manage and track bounce/complaints email to maintain healthy SES status
  Intermittent issues with containers abruptly stopping while on production
• Needed a highly available infrastructure the client wanted to monitor and notify whenever there are issues with the production URLs.

Built an efficient system:

• We proposed a solution to the company to help them manage their field workers efficiently.
• The system eliminated communication errors between the admins and the field workers, helped field workers report instantly without wasting time on paperwork.
• The data loss and duplicate entries were eliminated, and the workflow was automated.
• The system made tracking the work of field workers economical for the company and helped the company save 60-80% of its time.

Less friction:

• Upgrading to a new system is never frictionless. To eliminate friction in adopting the new system, we built an easy-to-use interface with an easy point-and-click task.
• The system seamlessly integrates with various third-party tools like Zapier, Suites, and Salesforce. This helped us decrease the learning curve of the system.

High availability:

• We designed a modern tech stack based on AWS services. In addition, the system had a highly scalable architecture design. This was done to ensure that the system did not break down during excessive workloads.

Generate bounce reports:

• The client wanted detailed email bounce reports. So our DevOps engineering team built an innovative integrated system consisting of AWS LAMBDA, AWS SNS, and AWS SQS to generate the email bounce reports.
• This also increased debugging visibility for developers, allowing them to know if there were any errors in uploading files.

Resolved the container abruptly stopping issue

Our team migrated the containers to a managed service ECS which automatically spawns a new container if the running container stops.

Provided an easy to monitor infrastructure

We use route 53 healthcheck to notify and provide alarms for our production URLs. Whenever the URL goes down, Rout53 sends an email saying that your production URL is unhealthy and is not working. We are using AWS cloudwatch to monitor the metrics and for storing the logs of various AWS services used in the project.
Overall, Route 53 Health Checks are used to monitor the health and availability of resources associated with domain names and ensure that they are responding correctly. This helps to detect and resolve issues quickly, reducing downtime and improving the
reliability and availability of applications and services.

• AWS Key Management Service: The AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is used to create and manage the cryptographic keys required for access control in the application. We have integrated AWS KMS with AWS CloudTrail to provide the logs of all key usage and monitor all activities.
• Amazon SQS: Amazon SQS works in collaboration with Amazon SNS and AWS Lambda to send the email bounce report.
• Amazon SNS: The Amazon SNS sends email notifications to the application whenever an email bounces.
• AWS Lambda: We use the AWS Lambda service to store the email bounce reports to S3.
• Amazon ECS: We integrated the Amazon ECS to make the system fail-safe. We did this because the system could not automatically restart once it failed.
• Route 53: Route 53 is configured to ensure that all the Domain URLs are working and to notify and provide alarms for our production URLs.
• Amazon Cloudwatch: The Amazon Cloudwatch service is used to store logs and help developers debug issues fast. Cloudwatch shows metrics like percentage CPU usage and helps the developers identify a blockage in the system. An Alarm is configured in the cloud watch to let developers know when a problem arises. We use AWS Cloudwatch dashboards to monitor our transactions. This helps us fix problems quickly whenever they arise.
• AWS CloudFront: The AWS CloudFront distribution is used with the AWS edge location to make the content globally available with a lower response time. In addition, these systems help us improve the user experience as the users get the
  information they want immediately.
• Application Load Balancer: We use an application load balancer to ensure that the workload is evenly distributed on our
  backend servers.
• AWS ECS: We use the ECS container to run the backend APIs and services.
  PostgreSQL: The PostgreSQL server is used as a database to store all the data related to the application. It contains data regarding the status reports of the AV/IT equipment installation, remarks of the fieldservice staff and previous error
  reports regarding the installation.
• AWS Certificate Manager: We have secured the endpoint with SSL/TLS. The AWS certificate manager helps us manage security certificates like SSL and TLS. Using the AWS certificate manager, we have removed the timeconsuming process of purchasing and renewing the SSL/TLS certificates.